Italian Food Blogger Now Jailed as Iran’s Cops Go Crackdown Crazy

ROME—There is a deafening silence inside the independent bookshop owned by Alberto and Miriam Piperno in south central Rome, and it is not to allow shoppers to browse. The couple’s 30-year-old daughter Alessia, a noted travel and food blogger and digital nomad who has spent the last seven years exploring the world, is in a prison in Tehran and her parents have been told by Italy’s Foreign Ministry to avoid reporters. Before they were silenced, Alberto posted a plea for help on Facebook with a recent photo his daughter posted from Tehran, where she had been for nearly three months. “This girl is Alessia Piperno, and she is my daughter,” he wrote Sunday on the now-deleted Facebook post. “Got a call this morning. It was her crying letting us know that she was in prison... She was arrested by police along with her friends while she celebrated her birthday. There were few words but they were desperate. She was asking for help.”