«Most people think autistic people can't do certain things, but this project proves the exact opposite. And as I always say, we autistic people will never give up!» Elisa speaks with a strong, steady voice. Another long day of walking has ended—one leg of a journey nearing its close. Around a campfire illuminating an otherwise dark countryside, Elisa and roughly twenty-five others in this diverse group keep the flames alive together.
It's a scene from the final section of the fine documentary On the Blue Trail, directed by Gabriele Vacis and produced by Michele Fornasero for Indyca Film. The film succeeds in its goal: to document the Con-tatto project for a broad audience, in collaboration with the Turin public health system.
Released in theaters on February 28 and screened on March 1 and 2 at Rome's Farnese cinema, the film continues to be shown by schools and organizations upon request (contact distributor Wanted). On April 2, World Autism Awareness Day, it will air in late evening on Tv2000.
At the premiere, Luca Rivoira, representing Rotary Club District 2031 in Piedmont (the project's primary partner), explained that the idea had emerged from a pilgrimage to Santiago and a proposal to attempt it also with people living with disability. The concept took shape quickly—though they chose a different destination: the Via Francigena to Rome, where they would meet the Pope at journey's end.
Once the proposal was framed, it was brought to Roberto Keller, a neuropsychiatrist and director of the Regional Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders in Adulthood at the Turin health authority. Keller saw such potential that he immediately began considering a departure date. The project, he believed, could offer these young autistic people far more than social development and physical activity. It could also serve as a powerful tool to challenge the stigma surrounding the autism spectrum.
«I wanted to bring real-world conditions to the social development techniques we practice in the clinic,» Keller explains. He observed how the techniques were absorbed more readily through constant reinforcement from staff and from the group itself. Moving these exercises—what the psychiatrist calls «a sort of toolkit, an instruction manual»—out of the clinic's familiar but abstract setting into a concrete, repeated, dynamic environment proved remarkably effective. Spending ten days together, twenty-four hours a day, without family members as a buffer, revealed new dimensions of each young person and clarified the root of certain behaviors.
«Each one was walking alone… twelve people who barely communicated. Living together changed the relationships. What emerged was a traveling community.»
The film documents the journey of Giuseppe Catalano, Elisa Del Signore, Simone Delle Rose, Francesco Faiella, Gianmarco Fioretti, Maurizio Girodo, Mickael Leveque, Giuseppe Mosca, Oliviero Panelli, Alice Secchi, Daniele Tarar, and Matthias Taverna, all between eighteen and thirty-five years old. Over ten days, they walked two hundred kilometers from Proceno—the gateway to the Lazio region on the Via Francigena—to Rome, where, as the credits reveal, Pope Francis himself welcomed them with blessing upon their arrival in the capital. The walk was carefully prepared over eighteen months of progressive training, extended by the pandemic, with the entire group meeting every Saturday morning for sessions of increasing difficulty.
The film sets out to dismantle easy stereotypes about autistic people—the notion that they are antisocial, emotionally distant, preferring isolation. Producer Fornasero admits that «this was a tremendous opportunity for us to move beyond assumptions we'd taken for granted.» On the Blue Trail shifts our own perspective on autism. The camera moves closer and pulls back, capturing both the group's momentum on the road and the sweeping landscape that frames it—a landscape that reconciles and heals. The camera allows us to cross distances that ordinarily separate us, and in doing so reveals how many stereotypes misrepresent autism.
True, we're watching a group of people with verbal abilities and reasonable personal autonomy. With autism, we've learned never to generalize; its shades are potentially infinite. Still, autism is often invisible at first glance, and frequently unsettles those who encounter only its behavioral differences. Repetitive behaviors or oddities that stem from autism's disruption of the automatic social reflexes most of us take for granted—the reflexes that help us adapt to our surroundings, especially when they're new and unexpected. Yet Keller is clear: «There's no attempt to cure autism. You don't recover from autism.» What the film documents so well is a search to «enable social living, to adapt—not to normalize—and to improve quality of life.»
A walk like this meant discovering new perspectives each day and each moment. It meant navigating genuinely difficult conditions, emotional and otherwise. Daniele dreaded the hills; Giuseppe sank into deep discouragement. Small changes carried enormous weight—learning to eat a frittata wrapped in bread because there was nothing else, or sleeping in a different bed every night. For parents, these shifts loomed large. Yet above all, the walk revealed the power of the group to catalyze these changes. In training, Keller recalls, «each person walked alone… twelve people who barely communicated. Living together changed the relationships. What emerged was a traveling community.»
During training, the young people grew accustomed to the staff who would follow them with cameras. Still, what strikes us is their authenticity—the immediacy of their true selves, their presence in the here and now, their capacity to find joy in the world around them: the wind, as Elisa does. Or Francesco, unselfconscious and completely absorbed, watching Elisa at once lost and present. If, as Fornasero suggests, we might wonder whether social skills training is essentially teaching them to perform, Keller answers that «in a way, yes—we all do it in many situations. You wouldn't go to work in a bathing suit.»
The footage and editing in the film reveal the intensity of emotion and feeling that those unfamiliar with autism risk dismissing or overlooking. Director Vacis says he'll carry away from this experience the capacity autistic people have to perceive perspectives most of us miss entirely. We hope this film—compelling and likely to reach a thoughtful audience—will inspire many to imagine the human beauty and joy these modern pilgrims discovered together, in a light still too rarely seen.