“Icon of public service”. This is how Usigrai (the RAI journalists’ union) defines it Giovanna Botteri in the farewell note for the retiring journalist. Sixty-seven years old, daughter of the former director of the Rai Friuli Venezia Giulia headquarters, Guido Botteri, she leaves public service after long years of a career that has seen her engaged on multiple fronts, often even war fronts.
“There are journalists so well trained that they themselves become icons of a profession” we read again in the note, which recalls the beginnings in the Triste office and then in Rome, from New York, passing through Beijing and Paris and touching on news and current events, from customs to correspondence from countries at war.
Graduated in Philosophy in Trieste, a doctorate in History of Cinema at the Sorbonne, a daughter, Sarah, born from her relationship with Lanfranco Pace, Giovanna Botteri is one of the most popular faces on Italian TV and has accompanied the audience of the news programs and Specials in getting to know and understanding of some of the most important events in recent history: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the war in Croatia, then in Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo, the Markale massacre and that of Srebrenica.
Botteri at Casa Lateral: “If Trump wins again it will be on welfare guarantees, not on the Floyd case”
In Albania it followed the Vlora revolt in ’97 and, during the war in Kosovo, in 1999 it entered Pec together with the Italian soldiers. After Algeria, Iran, South Africa she returned to her homeland to work with Michele Santoro on Circus and then on Sciuscià and returned to the field in 2001, with her reports from the G8 clashes in Genoa, and then returned to the hot on the planet, and witness the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the second Gulf War in Iraq.
Presenter of the 7pm Tg3 from 2004 to 2007, she was a RAI correspondent from the United States from 2007 to 2019 and then, until 2021, from China where she then followed the explosion of the Covid pandemic.
Florence, Giovanna Botteri: “Gender equality and Covid, we will only get out of it together”
Usigrai’s note continues: “Elegance, calmness, clarity, balance, but above all complete adherence to the values and mission of the public service have been and will be an example for generations of journalists. Never over the top, Giovanna Botteri has achieved great popularity simply by carrying out her job with dedication as a correspondent who tells without reservation what she sees. Heartfelt thanks go to her from UsigRai and from all her colleagues who have seen and will see in her a point of reference in carrying out their profession”.
