Ranucci’s instinct: a multi-award-winning investigative journalist

The saga of the elusive photo of the kiss between Sigfrido Ranucci and Maria Rosaria Boccia – revealed by Valter Lavitola’s ex-partner and denied by the two alleged protagonists (“it’s a photoshopped image”) – adds yet another grotesque chapter to the summer’s soap opera. This helps to paint a clearer picture of the protagonist’s psychological profile. For if there is one thing that the Ranucci case – with its whole circus of characters who are part megalomaniacs, part scoundrels – clearly demonstrates, it is the distorted perception of reality held by the unwitting victim of the fake attack. In this story, the highly decorated investigative journalist has consistently overestimated the most remote possibilities and underestimated the real dangers. It is as though he had allowed himself to be guided by the notion that reality must necessarily be tailored to his ego. From the ‘love bomb’ to the health card. 

According to his initial investigations, Ranucci had pieced it all together: there was, he said, a ‘black thread’ stretching from Adria through Manhattan – where the major international investment funds are based – via San Marcellino, until it reached the doorstep of his own home in the form of an explosive device. In this black thread, Ranucci clearly saw international arms trafficking, Libya, the hand of the Camorra and a political instigator. He had also discovered that he was being spied on by the secret services, on the orders of the fearsome Fazzolari.

He had not realised that the mastermind was his close friend Valter; that the man tailing him was Clesio Gomes Tavares, whom he had borrowed from Lavitola; that the black thread did not run through Manhattan but through the Cefalù bistro where he used to go to eat shelled clams; that the perpetrators were four ‘thugs’, who, incidentally, were uncovered thanks to the help of the Camorra. Meanwhile, whilst chasing ghosts, Ranucci – who had met Lavitola with the aim of using him to secure an interview with Dell’Utri – found himself conducting interviews in Zimbabwe on behalf of Lavitola, who was doing business in Africa.

That’s not all. Ranucci even writes a book because, after the bomb, he goes to buy a new car and is asked for his health card. He immediately perceives another dark thread in this, stretching from the car dealership to Peter Thiel, via Bin Laden, Daniele Capezzone, Rheinmetall and the ‘new Nazism’ of the global right: it is Palantir’s ‘surveillance democracy’ that wants to get its hands on his personal data. While he was thus unravelling this alleged thread of conspiracy in his mind—rejecting the possibility that his tax code was simply required for vehicle registration—Ranucci was also forging a close friendship with Maria Rosaria Boccia, a figure well known to the general public for her discretion, who has since written a book about their relationship: “Guai a chi lo tocca – Io, Sigfrido e le tempeste”. A copy is already on Thiel’s desk: the Palantir boss will find more information about Ranucci there than on his health card. Even if the kiss actually happened or was just AI.