David Willey, the veteran BBC correspondent whose reporting from Rome spanned more than half a century and five pontificates, has died in Italy at the age of 93.
Few journalists could claim so long or intimate an acquaintance with the workings of the Vatican and the wider world of Rome. Willey first glimpsed Pope Pius XII as a student, carried aloft through St Peter’s Basilica on the sedia gestatoria, flanked by ostrich-feather flabella and surrounded by elaborately attired courtiers. In 2025, more than seven decades later, he met the newly elected Pope Leo XIV from Chicago.
