Lorenzo Berardi

17th Nov 2021 -

11th Nov 2021 - On the rolling green hills of a national park near the Asian shore of the Bosphorus sits the small settlement of Polonezköy. Its name means 'Polish village' in Turkish and it was founded in 1842 with the name of Adampol, after the Polish prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. He wanted the village to become a shelter for his compatriots who fought for the independence of their motherland. Today, 180 years later, some descendants of those Poles who reached the Ottoman Empire in tough years still live in Polonezköy. However, the Polish identity of this quirky village is fading away.

10th Nov 2021 - A live conversation with Marina Lalovic from Rainews24's 'Checkpoint' regarding the recent developments at the Polish-Belarusian border. The focus here is on the key role played by the volunteers of Polish NGOs at the border in providing medical assistance to the migrants beyond the border. Also, we discussed the 'state of emergency' in the area decided since early September by the Polish government, preventing journalists to document and display the situation from the frontline.

10th Nov 2021 - Interviewed by Anna Maria Giordano on Rai Radio3 Mondo about the humanitarian and geopolitical crisis unfolding along the Polish-Belarusian border.

27th Oct 2021 - More than two weeks after the parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic, the country remains without a new government or a new premier-elect. This unprecedented stalemate is due to the sudden hospitalization of the President, Miloš Zeman, who would normally decide the outgoing Andrej Babiš’ heir. I asked Otto Eibl, politycal analyst at Masaryk University in Brno, whether a constitutional solution to this stalemate is going to be feasible.

25th Oct 2021

14th Oct 2021 - The Fenix Trophy is an international, UEFA-recognized tournament created by eight amateur and grassroots football clubs from continental Europe and the UK. It's all about fair play, inclusion and respect, but with an exciting competitive edge. Its goal is to bring football back where it belongs: to its supporters, by making friends not millionaires. Among the teams joining the first edition of the trophy there are AKS Zły from Warsaw and the Prague Raptors, haling from the Czech capital.

24th Jul 2021 - The story of the strongest female chess player of all times. Hungarian-born Judit Polgár grew up in Budapest and stormed the conservative, often mysoginistic, chess world since the 1980s as a teenager. Her aggressive, relentless way of playing inspired many, including the screenplayers of the series 'The Queen's Gambit' who crafted the screen version of Beth Harmon on Polgár.

3rd Feb 2021 - An interview on Radio Radicale regarding the ongoing demonstrations against the recent anti-abortion legislation in Poland. What impact might these civil society protests have on Poland and might they result in a stronger opposition?

2nd Feb 2021 - An interview on Radio3 Mondo regarding the resurgence of protests in Poland upon the further limits imposed on legal abortion from January 27. Whilst Aneta, a Polish teacher, talked about the demonstrations she has been joining and on their goals, I focused on the political climate surrounding them. For the current tightening of the legislation on abortion backed by the government is intertwined with recent, controversial, judicial reforms and with changes to the national media landscape.

15th Jan 2021 - A recap of the massive protests happening in Poland since October 2020 against the decision of the Constitutional Court to restrict further the possibility of having legal abortions in the country. Shortly after my piece, on 27th January, the ruling of the Court was published on the Official Journal of Law. It limits legal abortions only to cases of rape, incest or risks to the mother's survival: by far the strictest legislation in the EU.

22nd Nov 2000 - A poem on realia for the weird times we're living in and published by the American-Indian literary mag The Bombay Review.

30th Oct 2020 - An article in Italian complementing the podcast to recount and clarify what's going in Poland when it comes to abortion rights and the struggle of Polish women to keep them. Co-written with my three colleagues of Centrum Report: Salvatore Greco, Matteo Tacconi and Fabio Turco.

30th Oct 2020 - A podcast interview - in Italian - giving voice to two Polish women of two different generations. Amidst an ongoing pandemic, Anna Osmólska-Mętrak and Aneta Wielgosz took to the streets together with hundreds of thousands of compatriots. They took a stand against the controversial decision of the Polish Constitutional Court which might make up to 98% of legal abortions that occurred in Poland illegal.

13th July 2020 - Poland's incumbent president Andrzej Duda prevailed over liberal candidate Rafał Trzaskowski in the second round of the presidential elections by a narrow margin of 500k votes. I talked about these elections and their aftermath on Radio 3 Rai.