An update to the life story of the noted NPR correspondent, after-the-jump ….
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Nearly eight years ago, I dedicated a Top Comments diary to the NPR correspondent Sylvia Poggioli— whose parents emigrated from Italy during some tough times and — while Sylvia was born in Providence, Rhode Island — she went on a Fulbright scholarship to her ancestral home, married an Italian and became a permanent resident of Italy.
She had a difficult time finding employment commensurate with her educational background, and was eventually hired by NPR as a correspondent not only for Italy, but the Balkans and southern Europe. More recently, she had a front-row seat to watch former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, saying “Humility … is not a Silvio Berlusconi virtue”.
You can read my original essay (with some more biography as well as some humor from the Car Talk Guys (plus Zippy the Pinhead) all at this link.
Now ...……...... an update.
Last month, she gave an address at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York about her father …. and earlier last year, wrote a nice essay for the New York Review of Books— read it (as it’s not overly long) — here are some highlights.
After the death of her mother in 1987, she inherited all of her parents’ papers, yet was too busy with her reporting to look at them for thirty years. Finally she did … and learned quite a bit:
→ She found works written by the poet W.H. Auden, a friend of her parents.
→ She details how their life in Italy under Mussolini was always harrowing.
→ While teaching in Poland, a secret informant reported them to Mussolini.
→ They fled via ship to New York just over eighty years ago.
→ They were still being informed on (in the USA) due to being active anti-Facists.
→ Her father was given a choice in 1943: enlist, or go to an internment camp.
→ He died in 1963 (from a car crash) at the age of fifty-six.
parents: Renata and Renato PoggioliShe speaks of re-tracing their steps (from university town to town) and how his experience in working as an actor (as well as teaching) in Prague gave her a valuable sense of mission in covering the rise of playwright Vaclav Havel to lead a newly-liberated Czech Republic decades later.
She concludes on a down note:
Some of my parents’ descriptions of how demeaning life was under Italian Fascism—a repressive, inward-looking society filled with prejudice and falsehoods—could easily be applied now to Hungary and Poland, where autocrats are shutting down dissent and manipulating history to create narratives of victimhood. The charge leveled today against reporters as “enemies of the state” is exactly the same language the Mussolini regime used against anti-Fascists like my parents.
How painful it would be for my father to see his beloved, cosmopolitan Mitteleuropa, after peacefully toppling its Communist regimes, now enthusiastically embracing nationalism, nativism, and racism.
As noted, the original essay is not epic-length … do have a read.
Let’s close with the last charted hit that the late Fats Domino ever had … a cover version of Lady Madonna …. which Paul McCartney had dedicated to him.
x xYouTube VideoNow, on to Top Comments:
(Nothing came in from the field, for this evening).
From Ed Tracey, your faithful correspondent this evening ........
In the front-page story about the anti-LGBT pastor in Fort Worth who openly hoped that the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting were dead …. now having to resign due to charges of prostitution, drug use and gambling … CocoaLove suspects that the charges noted cryptically by his successor may be much worse… while alert reader gimmie truth riffs on the church’s name.And lastly: yesterday's Top Mojo - mega-mojo to the intrepid mik ...... who rescued this feature from oblivion:
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