Last weekend I went back to Giglio Island off the coast of Tuscany to cover the events commemorating last year’s deadly shipwreck. At 9:45 on the evening of January 13, 2012, Captain Schettino, Commander of the Costa Concordia Cruise Liner took his ship close to the shore of Giglio Island to do what is known …
Get ready….The Pope’s about to Tweet… Today the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI has a new twitter handle @pontifex and is planning to do his first tweet on December 12th, in eight languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic, Portugese and Polish. The Vatican’s new American media consultant, Greg Burke, told a packed press …
The Rome Film Festival is now over and there were so many films that I would love to write about, but one in particular stands out in my mind. It is the gut-wrenching epic BACK TO 1942 by Chinese director Feng Xiaogang. The film tells the story of the famine in Henan province in China …
Dear Blog Readers, This week I am covering the Rome Film Festival. There have been lots of films that I would love to write about and I haven’t had time, but I do want to write about Sylvester Stallone today. I was never a Sylvester Stallone fan. Rocky and Rambo weren’t my favorite movies, and …
Dear Blog Readers, I have been covering Italy since 1994 and the entire time one man, Silvio Berlusconi, has dominated the political scene. At a lunch with a group of journalists in the foreign press about one year ago, when Berlusconi was still clinging to power as Prime Minister, we went around the table with …
I leaned out over the Colonnade that surrounds St. Peter’s Square this morning peering down at the crowd below trying to locate my hero, Jake Finkbonner, the 12-year-old boy who gave the final push to make Kateri Takekwitha the first Native American Saint. Eventually I saw him when he went to get communion from Pope …
Yesterday I was covering a mini-summit in Rome with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Italian Premier Mario Monti, French President Francois Hollande and Spanish President Rajoy Mariano. I spent most of the day running around like a crazed chicken with her head cut off. It was steaming hot in Rome and TV News coverage involves lots …
This morning I had to cover a union demonstration in Rome. There were thousands of people young and old who descended on the city to participate in this peaceful demonstration to demand rights for workers and retired people. Now, as everyone knows, the economic situation in Europe is dramatic. Italy is among the handful of …