Dear Blog Readers, If you are thinking of coming to Italy, forget “Under the Tuscan Sun” and lounging around olive groves sipping white wine, eating pasta and dipping your bread in fragrant olive oil. That’s for namby-pambies. It is time to get yourself a few goose bumps and an adrenalin high UNDER the Marmore Falls. …
Last weekend I took a trip to the Amalfi coast with some friends and, at the suggestion of a colleague from the foreign press association, we decided to try and find Salvatore Aceto and his lemon farm. After landing in the port of Amalfi, teeming with tourists dragging trolleys and buying trinkets, we pushed past …
Dear Blog Readers, Yesterday, over two hundred journalists from the Foreign Press Association in Italy had an audience with Pope Francis. As the current President, I got to deliver a speech on behalf of the group. I worked on it for weeks and it was a summary of what I think are the challenges for …
Dear Blog Readers, Last weekend I traveled to the tiny island of Ventotene, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) off the coast of Italy, to participate in the Festival for European Solidarity in the Mediterranean (Festival dell’Europa Solidale e del Mediterranneo) bringing students, refugees, activists and journalists together to talk about how to overcome racism and …
Dear Blog Readers, Last Thursday I was between editing the Pope’s Easter Thursday Chrism Mass (where he blesses all the vats of oil to be used in Rome parishes for the year), covering an Amnesty International press conference on how they will be monitoring hate speech used on social media by politicians running in the …
I have a little piece of good news to share with you which will explain why, for the next year, I won’t be posting so often on this blog, I am the newly-elected President of the Foreign Press Association in Italy (Associazione della Stampa Estera in Italia www.stampaestera.org), the biggest foreign press association in the …
CLERICAL SEXUAL ABUSE REACHES THE TOP BOOKENDS McCarrick and Pell – two Cardinals who climbed to the peak of power within the Catholic Church are now reaping the results of sexual abuse of minors and will live for the rest of their days in shame and humility. The 89-year-old McCarrick is in a friary …
Rock-star priests and dancing nuns, shimmering skyscrapers and stinking chemical toilets, juvenile prisoners with tattoos and rosaries and Vatican staffers in Panama hats…those are just a few of the things I experienced covering the Pope last week in Panama. I sat on a bus with photographers and camerapersons and tried to edit video while helmeted …