Lonely Care

The photos I’m submitting were taken in the Antea Hospice, a foundation where I work as a doctor providing palliative care to terminal patients. “Lonely Care”’s main purpose is to convey the profound changes that the COVID experience imposed to the Hospice’s life.

Rome, Italy
April – December 2020
Antea Hospice

The photos I’m submitting are part of a larger project, “The Time Left”, started in 2018 and developed in the Antea Hospice, a foundation where I work as a doctor providing palliative care to patients who are no longer curable.
Since March 9, 2020 there have been profound changes in the Hospice’s life, which affect everybody be they patients, operators or visitors.
With the second pandemic wave we are facing a more difficult phase, and the strict safety standards have imposed the total closure of the structure to any visitors.
“Lonely Care” aims to bring to light the particular climate of these days. At the core of the palliative cares practiced in Hospice are the patients and their affections, in an embrace which is often also physical.
The distance imposed by law has mutilated this embrace and lowered the tones. There is more silence, the voids are more visible.
Working as medical doctor in this situation is becoming very challenging.
As a photographer I would like to give an intimate testimony of the feelings experienced during these days and nights in the Hospice, transmitting through a visual trace the pain and discomfort in which all we are working, living and often dying.