A pharmacy across the street from Vatican City in Rome, Italy. | Photo by Michael Wilner

    For Italian Catholics, a different debate over ‘choice’

    It may be the last empire in the world on which the sun never sets: the Catholic Church, a kingdom full of believers and skeptics alike, with its one billion followers strewn across the globe. With such reach and untold wealth, it might seem ill-advised to question its influence. But walk across the street from its seat of power, and you will find a direct challenge to that influence at the most unusual of places: a local pharmacy.

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    A lighted cross.

    Fighting the Good Fight: Profile of an Evangelical Missionary in Italy

    Brent Harrell is a Protestant Evangelical from Boise, Idaho who now lives and works in Rome as a missionary for his faith. Through his various efforts, some stemming from within the church he set up in a suburb of Rome, he hopes to missionize the world’s most Catholic country.

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    The nuns of Rome | Photo by Andrea Palatnik.

    The nuns of Rome

    While wandering the streets of Rome, Andrea Palatnik was struck by the volume of nuns in the city. Camera in hand, she documented almost every nun she came across and put together a slideshow.

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    Clothes hang between two trailers inside the government built Roma camp in Ardea. The fence separates the camp into Muslim and Christian sections although both groups move freely between both sides. Roma from Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina are likely to identify as Muslim while Roma from Serbia and Romania consider themselves Orthodox Christian or Catholic. | Photo by Bogdan Mohora

    Outside the camps: Helping the Roma in Rome

    The Roma (gypsies) are a group of people who are historically Italy’s most marginalized, hated, victimized and poor. Sant’Egidio is a lay organization that battles negative public sentiment to provide these people with the social services they desperately need. The services are not granted to them in the camps they are forced to live in by the government, which in turn has spurred ethic and religious conflicts within camp boundaries.

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    Amedeo Di Cori's photograph and the letters he sent from the Regano Coeli prison in Rome. | Photo by Aby Sam Thomas.

    Revealing Family Secrets

    Sara Terracina works as a tour guide in Rome’s Jewish Ghetto, explaining the history of the Jewish families there. But it was only in the past few months she learned more of her own family’s history — through a series of letters she rediscovers her uncle Amedeo, who was killed by the Nazis in 1945.

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    The Vatican. | Photo by Anam Siddiq.

    The paradox of birth control in Italy

    As the debate over birth control in the US rages on, this video takes a closer look at the duality of opinions – and practice – of women’s reproductive rights in Italy, and how the Catholic Church extends its long arms of the law across the pond.

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