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 month-old "Sardines" movement in Italy is gaining momentum, drawing huge crowds of people rallying against racism and populism.
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Rising sea levels are not the only threat to Venice. As residents continue to leave, the city risks becoming an empty shell sinking under mass tourism. Some 30 million visitors arrive every year. -
Venetians fear for the future of their city. Inundation by high tides and tourists is wrecking the island city's cultural heritage and may ultimately render Venice unlivable.
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"This is a real crisis for all of us, of all the system, of all the democracy," says the head of Rome's Jewish community. "That means that she must be protected from the hate as it was in the past." -
Even before the synod began, traditionalists were angered by the suggestion that, to offset a shortage of priests in the Amazon, married men might be ordained to serve in remote communities. -
Since 2016, the hard-right, anti-immigrant League party has won elections in many towns in Tuscany, a major shift in a region known as the birthplace of the Italian Communist Party. -
Doctors have warned of health risks from tons of garbage rotting in the Italian capital's streets during the summer's hot spells. -
"I believe this is the first time since the beginning of European integration that this European Union could actually break apart," center-left Dutch politician Frans Timmermans warned this month. -
Salvini, Italy's deputy prime minister, leader of a far-right party and Europe's rising populist star, counts President Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon as one of his biggest fans. -
Judges in The Hague upheld the Bosnian Serb leader's conviction in connection with the 1995 Srebrenica massacre that claimed the lives of 8,000 Muslim men and boys.
