Sylvia Poggioli


Sylvia Poggioli
is an American radio reporter for National Public Radio. She is the network's senior European correspondent.

Early life

Poggioli was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she attended the Buckingham School. She graduated from Harvard College in 1968. She did post-graduate work at the University of Rome as a Fulbright Scholar. The selection of Rome was no coincidence, as she is the daughter of Italian anti-fascists who in the 1930s were forced to flee Italy under Mussolini. Her father, Renato Poggioli, was the author of The Theory of the Avant-Garde and one of the founders of the anti-fascist Mazzini Society.

Career

In 1971, Poggioli began working for Ansa, the Italian news service, at their English desk. She made her debut on NPR on September 4, 1982. She continued serving both Ansa and NPR for four years before leaving Ansa in 1986.
Poggioli eventually rose to European correspondent for NPR. Her radio career was interrupted in 1990 when she spent a year as a research fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Poggioli was in London, gathering European reaction, during the 1991 Gulf War. Later, she was lauded for her coverage of the war among the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats. For her coverage, she won the George Foster Peabody Award in 1993.
In 2005 Poggioli was the featured reporter for the funeral of Pope John Paul II and subsequent conclave.
Poggioli has become a favorite reporter of the Magliozzi Brothers on Car Talk, possibly on account of their common Italian ancestry. Her name has also been featured in the absurdist comic strip Zippy the Pinhead.
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 at Boston.

Personal life

Poggioli resides in Rome, Italy. Her husband, Piero Benetazzo, a 1982 Nieman Fellow, died January 11, 2015, at home in Rome 13 months after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He was 78.