She was called "our most celebrated female writer" by Ferruccio De Bortoli, former director of the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Decades ago, the Los Angeles Times described her as "the journalist to whom virtually no world figure would say no."
As a young journalist, she interviewed many internationally known leaders and celebrities such as Henry Kissinger, the Mohammad Reza Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, Lech Wałęsa, Willy Brandt, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Walter Cronkite, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Federico Fellini, Sammy Davis Jr, Deng Xiaoping, Nguyen Cao Ky, Yasir Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Alexandros Panagoulis, Wernher von Braun, Archbishop Makarios, Golda Meir, Nguyen Van Thieu, Haile Selassie and Sean Connery.
Following an interview with Ayatollah Khomeini she authored a book, titled "Ayatollah", which is forbidden to be published inside Iran.
After retirement, she authored a series of articles and books that roused controversy amongst certain Islamic and Arab factions.
She spent the last years of her life in New York, where she lived for several years with lung and breast cancer, which she referred to as "the Other One" in her most recent books. She returned to Italy before dying of cancer in a hospital in her native Florence on the night between the 14th and the 15th of September 2006