Tony Rocca

Books behind my Byline

                                                              BY TONY ROCCA

I was born near Manchester in the north of England, where I grew up and joined a local newspaper at the age of seventeen. I graduated to the Daily Mail  in London where I spent ten years doing many editorial jobs, including a spell as New York correspondent. Then followed a further ten years in London with The Sunday Times as a reporter, feature-writer and foreign correspondent. My fifteen minutes of fame came with the demise of Now!  magazine which suddenly become Then!  (it folded on the very morning I joined). Next came a brief period as features editor of the Mail on Sunday  and several years freelancing from the South of France before Mira and I left for Italy and our adventure in Tuscany. My articles have appeared in most British national newspapers as well as The New York Times  and  Reader's Digest.  

About

Tony Rocca

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I was born near Manchester in the north of England, where I grew up and joined a local newspaper at the age of seventeen. I graduated to the Daily Mail in London where I spent ten years doing many editorial jobs, including a spell as New York correspondent. Then followed a further ten years in London with The Sunday Times as a reporter, feature-writer and foreign correspondent. My fifteen minutes of fame came with the demise of Now! magazine which suddenly become Then!  (it folded on the very morning I joined). Next came a brief period as features editor of the Mail on Sunday and several years freelancing from the South of France before Mira and I left for Italy and our adventure in Tuscany. My articles have appeared in most British national newspapers as well as The New York Times and Reader's Digest. 

 

Mira Rocca

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As readers of our book Memories of Eden will know, I was born into a Jewish Iraqi family in Baghdad. We left Iraq and spent many years travelling:  to India, Palestine, Cyprus, the new state of Israel — and, finally, to London in 1964.  I took various travel-related jobs before marrying Tony in 1972, then four years later I opened my own travel agency in Fleet Street with his help, which became quite successful. Several years later we woke up and realised there had to be a better way to spend our days. And so an idea was born . . . after all, he came from an Italian family background,  I spoke some languages (though not Italian), we were both well-travelled. What if we sold our apartment, sold the agency, he quit his job and we said goodbye to London and set off on a new adventure. To somewhere like Italy – more especially, Chianti, where we'd been picking grapes for some friends and fallen in love with the landscape?

 

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My Laptop

This is my first laptop, a forward-folding typewriter first made in 1912 by the Corona company in New York. The model had a special tripod, allowing it to be used by correspondents in the trenches of World War One. This particular example was bought by my father and I bashed out my first newspaper articles on its clunky keys as the proprietors of the Stockport County Express did not think a cub reporter deserved one of their precious Remingtons.  I had to balance it on a plank between two desks (I didn’t qualify for one of those, either). It is perhaps my proudest possession and still works well, though today I prefer the products of Apple.

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Newswall

This is my Newswall,  aka The Cutting Edge. After accumulating clippings of my work over three decades they started to weigh heavily every time we moved – from the UK to France, then Italy, then back to France. I never looked at them; they were just taking up space. Then an artist friend, Michel Scarpa, offered to pulp them and create a mash of bricks to hang on the wall. Brilliant!  You can see other examples of his talents on his website.