The personal exhibition The End of the Journey is dedicated to the theme of travel, which the Civic Museum of Castelbuono is dedicating to the photojournalist Francesco Bellina (Trapani, 1989) from 20 November 2022 to 16 April 2023 . The exhibition, curated by Laura Barreca, is a story in images in a place that we know to be in Africa, and precisely Agadez, a city in Niger. The name of Agadez, a union of the Berber terms "egdez" ("to gather") and "gedez" ("to visit"), and despite the reference to hospitality, today Agadez is instead known internationally as the infamous crossroads of the migratory route of thousands of human beings in search of a future, in the hands of unscrupulous traffickers who have set up a profitable illegal economy here. The end of Francesco Bellina's journey begins here: within an African community that today has reorganized itself as the main clearinghouse for migrants who from Africa reach, if all goes well, the European coasts, and other destinations around the world.

The photographs, selected by the photographer from the hundreds taken around the city, the streets, meeting humanity besieged by absolute poverty. Bellina in her portraits of houses, places, people, tells us what happens behind a veil, beyond a curtain, at the end of an alley. As in Dante's wandering The end of the journey shows all the topoi of the journey undertaken, through the stages that lead to a more or less known end. Who are the protagonists of the "endless journey" then? By portraying the faces, the looks, the contexts of violence, fear, suffering in this limbo inhabited by women, children, men, we find ourselves together and powerless to share all the evil in the world. Francesco Bellina's gaze is never ambiguous, inquisitive or judgmental, he does not take the side of the "righteous", because in the general horror it is difficult to say who is wrong and who is right, but more simply returns humanity in all its powerful fragility, without the often gratuitous ambiguity that the press lets out.

Francesco Bellina's photographic works immortalize places, architectures, faces, situations that try to capture and tell the stories behind each subject. Behind every image, often mortified by the massive use made of it by the media, there are people, with their humanity, fragility, fears, hopes and ambitions.