Moving pictures, small successful stories and, as protagonists, simple citizens whose environmental commitment allowed a whole community to "make the difference."
This was the core message of the photo-exhibition "Change the climate, Heroes of Earth", inaugurated on Tuesday at the MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome as primary initiative to celebrate the international Earth Day 2014.
The exhibition, organized by Earth Day Italy and Shoot4change no-profit association in partnership with the World Bank, saw the contribution of some of Italy's best-known photographers, from Gianni Berengo Gardin to Francesco Zizola, from Riccardo Venturi to Giovanni Gastel and Toni Thorimberg.
Overall twenty-three authors told stories gathered all around Italy, either in big cities, small towns, or countryside communities. As organizers explained, the exhibition's goal was twofold: find an "emotional" way to convey the awareness campaign, and provide citizens with a proactive message.
"Photographs can be very touching and communicate an environmental message better than many other tools," Pierluigi Sassi, president of Earth Day Italy, explained to Xinhua.
"Besides, Italy needs to make a significant leap towards a better protection of its natural resources, and we believe this change can be promoted through positive examples." he said.
As such, visitors were invited to wander among the many visual stories, some of them creative, some inspiring, others still commendable for the undeterred commitment of its characters.
Among those was the example of Castelbuono, a small medieval village in Sicily where donkeys proved to be more functional (and much less polluting) than garbage trucks in implementing the separate collection of rubbish.
Another story depicted the work inside the botanic lab of Tor Vergata University in Rome, where researchers are studying a local variety of grass that is able to clean up polluted soils from heavy metals and pesticides.
There were pictures of the "Guerriglia Gardening" from Milan, young urban volunteers making "green flash mobs" to put plants in the forgotten corners of their city, and of a small village in the mountains where the municipality has developed a district heating plant fuelled by forest biomass only.
"All these stories are proof that things can be changed by ordinary people with ordinary actions," Shoot4change photographer Antonio Amendola explained. Visitors at the exhibition echoed his belief.
"I was captured by the pictures of renewable energy plants in Bologna," Donatella Streglio from Rome told Xinhua. "They are comforting to me, because it means there is still hope for the environmental struggle" she added.
Maria Teresa Mazzotta from Lecce, about seventy, hoped this sort of "emotional" campaign would impact positively on younger generations. "People of my age are used to make a limited use of resources such as water or energy, because they were expensive in our times," she said to Xinhua.
Old people's behaviors are therefore naturally eco-friendly, she continued, while young people has to be taught how "to be gentle" to the Earth.
Many cities and communities in Italy took part in the Earth Day 2014 celebrations, together with around a billion people worldwide.
The interest showed by Italians, however, seemed to be proportionate to the magnitude of the problem. According to Italy's main environmental organization Legambiente, 30,000 "environmental crimes" are at least committed every year in the country.
Therefore, the focus on an awareness campaign was felt as crucial, especially since the 2014 report by the United Nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated there is a short time left for the global population to avoid an environmental disaster.
Earth Day Italy's president Pierluigi Sassi underlined, "the role of citizens and their behavior towards earth and natural resources is most crucial".
