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Frances D’Emilio is a writer and journalist based in New York and Rome. As a longtime foreign correspondent for The Associated Press, she pioneered coverage of sociological aspects of organized crime, including grassroots rebellions and bold new strategies by judges and prosecutors in Italy. She has chronicled the progress and setbacks of women in Italy, particularly in the workplace and in immigrant communities. She is a keen and analytical follower of politics in Europe. For her reportage in the Mediterranean area, Frances followed political, economic and social developments in Italy, Turkey, Malta, Albania and Libya.
Her passion for travel, particularly for exploring tiny Mediterranean islands, is reflected in feature writing, both for The Associated Press and freelance for The New York Times.
Her insightful, often humorous perspective on Rome is the basis for her first book, “Hippocrene Insiders’ Guide to Rome.” The book intersperses brief essays, drawn from personal experience, on aspects of the city, including how foreigners – and foreign women – are viewed, with practical advice about how to appreciate Rome’s monuments, piazzas and often-overlooked neighborhood gems.
Another passion is languages, for the insights they provide into the people who speak them. Frances fluently speaks Italian – almost like a Roman by now but still with indelible traces of her accent from her native New York. She has studied French at cultural centers run by the French embassies to Italy and to the Vatican, and Russian at the Institute of Russian Culture and Language in Rome. Keen to improve her Polish in honor of her maternal ancestors, Frances studied the language at the intermediate level at university in Krakow. Her knowledge of Spanish was put to extensive use while traveling with Pope John Paul II to Uruguay, Chile and Argentina during the globe-trotting pontiff’s second-longest pilgrimage of his papacy.
Her empathy and integrity in reporting are crucial to much of her work. Two difficult-to-report stories heavily depended on those qualities. For one of them, she gained the trust of a woman whose son was ordered removed from her home by a juvenile court judge in southern Calabria seeking to break a generational legacy of organized crime in the largely impenetrable ‘ndrangheta syndicate. In another, a Pakistan-born woman agreed to defy cultural pressures in recounting her rebellion against forced marriage in immigrant communities of northern Italy.
Her next writing project will explore the challenges and rewards of expat life while keeping a foothold in one’s native land.