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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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. -
It's being called the largest maritime salvage operation ever. The 'rotation" of the wrecked Costa Concordia cruise liner to an upright position is under way off the west coast of Italy. The massive ship is now clear of the reef that had penetrated the hull. There are no pollutants escaping from the vessel. Fuel and other polluting agents had been removed. The process is going more slowly than predicted but engineers on site say it is going well. When the ship is upright, huge flotation tanks on the port and starboard sides will be activated and it will be towed to a scrap yard. Thirty two people died when the ship ran aground twenty months ago. Two are still missing.
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The Costa Concordia is lying on its side in shallow waters off the west coast of Italy. It struck a reef 20 months ago when the captain steered too close to land. Thirty-two people died. On Monday, the task is to begin to slowly rotate the ship to an upright position, using a complex system of chains and underwater platforms and cables.
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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. -
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. -
Congo-born Cecile Kyenge's appointment in April as integration minister was hailed as a landmark for diversity. Instead, the mood of racial progress in Italy has suffered. The debate highlights growing intolerance and what the prime minister has called a shameful chapter for the country. -
Many cities hold arts festivals during the summer. Rome joined the party last Saturday as part of a larger effort to radically revamp traffic and make the area around the Coliseum and other monuments more welcoming for pedestrians. -
Every two years, Venice hosts the largest and oldest noncommercial art exhibit in the world. It's a dizzying and eclectic array of sights by both celebrity artists and total unknowns. More than 150 artists from 88 countries will be on display through November. -
There's no proof that Giovanni Palatucci saved the lives of 5,000 Jews, say historians who studied a trove of wartime documents. Supporters of Palatucci are fighting back, as Holocaust museums pull exhibits on the Italian policeman who had been on the track to sainthood.
