Sylvia Poggioli
Sylvia Poggioli is senior European correspondent for NPR's International Desk covering political, economic, and cultural news in Italy, the Vatican, Western Europe, and the Balkans. Poggioli's on-air reporting and analysis have encompassed the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the turbulent civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and how immigration has transformed European societies.
Since joining NPR's foreign desk in 1982, Poggioli has traveled extensively for reporting assignments. These include going to Norway to cover the aftermath of the brutal attacks by a right-wing extremist; to Greece, Spain, and Portugal reporting on the eurozone crisis; and the Balkans where the last wanted war criminals have been arrested.
In addition, Poggioli has traveled to France, Germany, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Sweden, and Denmark to produce in-depth reports on immigration, racism, Islam, and the rise of the right in Europe.
She has also travelled with Pope Francis on several of his foreign trips, including visits to Cuba, the United States, Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic, Myanmar, and Bangladesh.
Throughout her career Poggioli has been recognized for her work with distinctions including the WBUR Foreign Correspondent Award, the Welles Hangen Award for Distinguished Journalism, a George Foster Peabody, National Women's Political Caucus/Radcliffe College Exceptional Merit Media Awards, the Edward Weintal Journalism Prize, and the Silver Angel Excellence in the Media Award. Poggioli was part of the NPR team that won the 2000 Overseas Press Club Award for coverage of the war in Kosovo. In 2009, she received the Maria Grazia Cutulli Award for foreign reporting.
In 2000, Poggioli received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Brandeis University. In 2006, she received an honorary degree from the University of Massachusetts Boston together with Barack Obama.
Prior to this honor, Poggioli was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences "for her distinctive, cultivated and authoritative reports on 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia." In 1990, Poggioli spent an academic year at Harvard University as a research fellow at Harvard University's Center for Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.
From 1971 to 1986, Poggioli served as an editor on the English-language desk for the Ansa News Agency in Italy. She worked at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. She was actively involved with women's film and theater groups.
The daughter of Italian anti-fascists who were forced to flee Italy under Mussolini, Poggioli was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's degree in romance languages and literature. She later studied in Italy under a Fulbright Scholarship.
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The Eataly food emporium plans to open a $55 million theme park in Italy, devoted to the nation's culinary pleasures. Some have dubbed it the "Disneyland of food," but Italians aren't impressed. -
The United Nations watchdog for children's rights has accused the Vatican of caring more about its own reputation and members of the clergy than the victims of sexual abuse. The group is calling for the Vatican to immediately remove any priests suspected of sexually abusing children.
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What can't Pope Francis do? First he's Time's "Person of the Year," then he's a Rolling Stone cover story. Now, graffiti art in Rome is depicting the pontiff as a comic-book caped crusader. Even the Vatican approves. -
The site in central Rome has also yielded evidence of how actively the early Romans intervened to shape their urban environment. But the excavation has been particularly challenging because the temple lies below the water table. -
The Vatican is vowing to defeat the Church of England — not in the pews but on the cricket pitch. The Vatican has launched a cricket club, which draws from seminarians and priests of different nationalities who live and study in Rome. It's hoped the club will forge ties with teams of other faiths. -
Seven months into his papacy, Pope Francis is shaking up the Catholic world, with outspoken interviews and cold calls to ordinary people. But some Catholic conservatives are deeply uncomfortable and worried that the Vatican has lost control of the papal message. -
The cruise ship, which ran aground in January 2012 off the coast of Tuscany, will be stabilized and checked to make sure it can make it through the harsh winter. In the spring, the vessel will be floated to a scrap yard. -
Next week, a salvage crew plans to rotate and raise the Costa Concordia cruise ship, in one of the biggest maritime salvage operations ever undertaken. The huge vessel has been partially submerged off Giglio Island since an accident in January 2012 that killed 32 people. -
Legend has it that an innkeeper caught a glimpse of the goddess of love in her bedroom and then rushed to his kitchen to create an egg pasta inspired by Venus' belly button. Today the art of making tortellini is endangered, but several groups are devising creative ways to preserve the tradition. -
Ai Weiwei, the world-renowned Chinese artist and dissident, has created a deeply autobiographical work for the Venice Biennale exhibit. It is a series of dioramas about his life as a political prisoner, when he was jailed for criticizing the corruption and shoddy construction that caused the deaths of 5,000 children when schools collapsed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
