Serra Barbara

Born in Milan to a Sardinian father from Decimomannu and a Sicilian mother from Gela, she spent the first nine years of her life in Italy before moving to Copenhagen, where she attended the international school. In 1993, she moved to London to study International Relations at the London School of Economics.

After a preparatory year in the journalism department at City University of London and her first editorial experiences, in 2000 she began collaborating with the BBC on the program Today broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and was later employed as a reporter for BBC London News.

In 2003, she was hired by Sky News and covered various international and UK news stories. Notable assignments include her correspondences from Rome during the funeral of Pope John Paul II and the legal case involving Michael Jackson.

In 2005, she moved to present the Channel 5 news; in this role, she became the first non-native English speaker to present a newscast in the UK.

From 2007, she contributed from the Al Jazeera English studios in London. For the Arab network, she conducted important investigations in Washington, the Gaza Strip, Israel, and the West Bank. She also covered, for Al Jazeera, Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic journey to the Holy Land as a journalist accredited by the papal delegation—marking the first time a journalist from that network traveled with the Vatican authority.

Since October 2023, she returned to work at Sky News UK as a presenter.

In Italy, in the spring of 2011, she hosted the TV program Cosmo on Rai 3; she is also a commentator on the long-running show Tv Talk and occasionally appears on programs focused on current affairs.

She is the author of the book Gli italiani non sono pigri (2014), for which she won the Caccuri Literary Prize.

In addition to Italian as her mother tongue and English as her dominant language, she also speaks Danish and French.

Her paternal grandfather was Vitale Piga Serra, mayor of Carbonia from September 28, 1939, to April 22, 1942, a city founded by the Fascist regime. In 2020, she made the documentary Fascism in the Family, retracing her grandfather’s history between Italy of the past and present.