In a city like Naples, in a district like Rione Sanità where there is a permanent crisis, facts, encounters, actions, words, and songs happened that in their simplicity show a sprout of newness and hope. The exhibition moves through this story; it documents the revival of a humanity that flourishes in the encounter with Christianity; it speaks about men that become free again and, within the present contradictions, are able to look at their future with hope. Also the display of one of San Gennaro’s relics reminds the visitor that the encounter with the Christian event allows living within any circumstance with a new hope: when the blood liquefies, also man’s heart liquefies.

The Neapolitan philosopher Giovanni Battista said something true “They seem problems, instead they are opportunities”. The exhibition narrates many “opportunities” generated by the encounter with an event that reawaked the I of many people. Works are born that respond to the district’s needs: children’s aftercare, the Solidarity Center, the cooperative project, many charitable initiatives.

It is a story of today inserted within the tradition: men (they are all blessed or saints, now) who lived reality intensely in an historical moment of emergency (the unity of Italy), founding education works, and charitable works for needy families or poor girls. Also the story of the beginning of the Banchi and Monti di Pietà [pawnshops], in the XVI Century, shows how the Christian event generates a concrete response to the material needs of the people. In the exhibition a typical votive wall shrine from Naples depicting Saint Cajetan of Thiene (one of the founders of the Banchi). Finally, the visitors will find themselves in the middle of the backstreets of this town with its beauties and its contradictions; they will meet the people from Naples and their traditions, crafts and arts. Paintings and handicrafts, pottery and nativity scenes are displayed. The exhibition ends with an image that from a particular (a window) opens up to the horizon over the sea, in order to show that whatever the visitors encountered is openness towards the infinite.