A native New Yorker, Sari Gilbert wrote her Ph.D thesis on Italian foreign policy and has lived and worked in Italy since then. The co-author (with Michael Brouse) of the National Geographic Traveler guidebook of Rome, she covered Italy for American newspapers and magazines including The Washington Post, Newsweek, the Boston Globe, Nation, Travel and Leisure, Reader’s Digest, Attenzione, and MS for more than two decades before becoming a political correspondent for a major Italian daily. More recently, she divides her time between work as a editorial consultant for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and author of the newsblog Stranitalia.