After more than 40 years on NPR’s foreign desk, Sylvia Poggioli says she’s transitioning away from that role, and moving on to new things, including a book about her father.
Being based in Rome, the network’s senior foreign correspondent says she’s been getting an outpouring of support from listeners and colleagues.
“NPR is sense of a community, it’s unique. It doesn’t exist here in Europe,” Poggioli explained. “There’s national radio, there’s sort-of government sponsored (sometimes the government interferes, sometimes it doesn’t), but the concept of a sort of public radio that’s listener supported, is something pretty alien when I explain it to most Europeans.”
Poggioli was born in Providence, Rhode Island, but moved to Italy after college under a Fulbright Scholarship.
Her father, Renato Poggioli, who was born in Florence, Italy, had an academic career that includes time at both Harvard University and Brown University. He and wife Renata fled Europe in the late 1930’s, not wanting to live under a fascist regime.
“I want to talk about his intellectual odyssey, and how he was able to flourish in the United States,” she said. “But he never gave up his ties with his country of origin. He was very much a cosmopolitan person. I think I want to talk about that most of all.”
Renato Poggioli died in a car crash in 1963. Sylvia inherited her father’s letters, manuscripts, and essays in the 1980’s, after her mother passed away. She says not to expect the biography of her father anytime soon, saying she hasn’t yet begun the required research.
When looking at the future of leadership in the Italy under far-right leadership, Poggioli said the signs are not good.
“I find it a very worrisome prospect,” she said. “It’s true there’s this huge backlash across Europe against migrants, against refugees. And that has definitely had this effect of people closing in on themselves, raising real walls, and psychological walls. And nobody really a solution, certainly here in Europe, on how to deal with it.”
Poggioli’s decades of work at NPR also includes numerous reports on Pope John Paul II, the late Pope Benedict, and Pope Francis.
In a recent conversation with Weekend Edition Host Scott Simon, she also discussed years of covering refugees in Italy, three pontiffs, and the country’s first McDonald’s, part of the slow food movement, opening in 2004.
Poggioli also talked about a 2016 story about having to take her driver’s license test in Italy, which contains more than 7,000 potential questions.
“I can honestly say it was the toughest exam I’ve taken in my life,” she said, with a laugh.
