Children without smiles in a photographic exhibition for Unicef

The unsmiling children portrayed over more than ten years in countries at war,

affected by humanitarian crises or in abandoned corners of the world,

​​, which will be inaugurated on Thursday at the MAXXI museum in Rome and will be open until 5 March.

One year after the start of the conflict in Ukraine, the exhibition is an account of the horrors of war and emergencies, but it also tells of the hopes placed in children.

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"The symbolic face of this exhibition - explains Giammarco Sicuro - is that of a little girl from Sviatohirsk, a village in Donbass, whom I photographed after the liberation, after months of occupation by the Russian army. A sad face, with a lost look and empty, incapable of smiling: 'Can you smile for me?'".

In Ukraine 3.4 million children are in need of humanitarian assistance, 3.9 million have fled their country.

In Afghanistan they are experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.

"In wars and emergencies, children are the most affected: they lose their childhood, school, home, family, health, certainties; some of them only know violence and escape", underlines Carmela Pace, president of the Unicef ​​Italia, thanking the author of the exhibition "because thanks to his shots we can make known the stories that lie behind the numbers".