Like a door into their intimacy and captivating simplicity, Silence is a Gift gently celebrates the inhabitants of Southern Italy, a region still scarred by modern tragedies.

Rione Sanità (Naples), Santa Lucia (Cosenza), Torre del Greco. There are places in Southern Italy that carry scars of incurable wounds on the walls and on the flesh of its inhabitants. In those wounds lay the historical memory and the real face of people. Their names are Alfonso, Elena, Marco, Stefania, to name a few. Some are from the same districts and know each other, others don’t. But they have one thing in common: they’ve all met Ciro Battiloro, who has followed them into the intimacy of their home, with his camera and with his heart. He portrayed their everyday life by taking part in it. Never an intruder, Ciro Battiloro is a friend, a brother, and a confident. He doesn’t focus so much on the marginality, but rather on the extraordinary vitality. He has seen new lives being born, children becoming teenagers, and then parents in their turn. He also had to say goodbye. Silence is a Gift is about love and loneliness, life and death, pain and joy — but most importantly, about intimacy and resistance.