On the morning of 3 October 2013, a vessel carrying more than 250 Eritrean migrants sank off the island of Lampedusa, and a photographer arrived to do what photographers do — to witness. It was in the salt air and silence of that assignment that the Sicilian photojournalist understood, with the particular clarity that tragedy sometimes forces upon us, that aesthetics alone could no longer satisfy her. The camera, she realised, was not a paintbrush; it was something closer to a conscience. That recognition carried her, years later, to Amman, where she and journalist Marta Bellingreri — a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs who was then living in Jordan — began a long, patient collaboration at the Médecins Sans Frontières Al-Mowasah hospital.

Three visits a week, across several months, were spent beside patients who had travelled from Iraq, Gaza, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon to receive care that their own shattered countries could no longer provide. The project they built together, *The Hospital of All the Wars*, is less a photo essay than an act of sustained, deliberate attention. Among those patients was Manal, a twelve-year-old from Kirkuk who had survived a missile explosion that left severe burns across her arms and face. When the photograph was taken, she was required to wear a protective mask for roughly five hours each day to shield her healing skin from light; around her in the hospital room hung her own drawings, and a balloon was tucked cheerfully under her arm.

The shoot, the photographer recalls, felt less like work than like play.