«FREE TO STAY UNITED» was the slogan that we raised on our picket signs in the spring of 1974. In support of the divorce law in the referendum campaign for its abrogation. With the battles for rights, we were absolutely convinced that this was the right way to modernize and emancipate the country: culturally and politically. It was our twenties, we had to find a sense to those years.

But after that season of the 1970s I often tried to glimpse such movements of the spirit in the new generations: pride and desecration for the conquest of one’s own future. If only because we know that the rights that are gained may not last forever, when culture fails to permeate minds. For several decades the bitter sensation was of a world apparently without sufficient motivation to mobilize the consciences of young people.

Then, suddenly, in 2018 a little Swedish girl meticulously takes up the battle against climate change, induced by the enthronization of the industrial revolution and the modern dissolute lifestyle of the most advanced economies. And so, even in the Italian provinces, and in the rest of the world, in 2019 the squares are mobilizing again as I remembered them. Mostly it’s loud kids with their colourful slogans filling them. They strike for the climate, for the well-being of their future lives.

Surprised by that sudden impulse, I rushed among them: to understand, to share… to photograph. A large “tribe” appeared to me with painted faces, like the Native Americans did. Faces that reflect the cleanliness of the soul. Happy and angry faces at the same time, full of hopeful confidence. Facies for the Future.