Italy and Georgia

Owen Bennett Jones introduces insight, wit and analysis from foreign correspondents around the world. In this edition, Manuela Saragosa explains why Italy's famed 'bella figura' is not as fine an image abroad as it once was; Damien McGuinness explores Georgian attitudes to men's and women's work - and how they're increasingly outdated.

"What do they say about us over there?"

Many people around the world think that visiting journalists give their country too negative an image. ‘You only show the bad news! Why don’t you ever report on the good things that happen here?’. It's a refrain every journalist has heard over and over again.

Journalists do tend to take their bad-news agenda with them wherever they go. But as Manuela Saragosa has been hearing, in Italy, some people have begun to wonder whether their country’s image abroad is not just a result of media exagerration, but might also be rooted in reality.

Women stop traffic in Tbilisi - but not for the reasons you think

Traditionally, the country of Georgia has had quite a macho culture, with men supposed to provide for the family and women to cook and look after the children. But today’s reality is very different, with high rates of male unemployment and the plentiful jobs in the growing service sector being generally done by women. In fact, some argue that the country's actually kept going these days by a female rather than male workforce

Damien McGuinness has been out on the streets of Tbilisi - and met a woman whose job is so out of keeping with traditional sex roles that she causes crowds and stares wherever she goes.