Ranucci of Cheope: he scorns the foreign correspondent role, the Rai’s latest source of pride. Caparica: “Only here does it serve to remove and compensate”

Rome. He prefers his own small, wretched world to the finest job in the world: that of foreign correspondent in Cairo, where Sigfrido Ranucci could report on the Middle East, the crisis in Hormuz, the conflicts, the regimes, the Mattei Plan… “Only in Italy,” says Antonio Caprarica – the epitome of elegance and rigour in public television, the RAI correspondent from London, and before that from Moscow and Paris – “can foreign correspondence be regarded as a form of compensation, a way of resolving corporate problems”. But in reality? “It is a privilege that today only Rai, the public broadcaster, funded by the licence fee, can afford. It is a magnificent opportunity that allows one to experience exhilarating moments and to come into contact with great history. Only here is it treated as a fiefdom, like a barony, and a whole country, a whole organisation, hinges on Ranucci.”

Ruggero Orlando would introduce himself to viewers with: “This is New York…”, whilst Paolo Frajese was in Paris and Sergio Canciani in Moscow. Caprarica, where did you start out as a correspondent? “In Cairo, actually, but I also covered Jerusalem. I had two offices. Bruno Vespa used to jokingly call me the ‘Emperor of the Middle East’.” Rai offered Ranucci a post at Tg3, Rai News and the Cairo bureau as a correspondent – the role any journalist today would covet: a vantage point over a world in turmoil, the epicentre of the crisis. Caprarica, whom Rai let slip through its fingers, says as a long-serving employee, “that in a serious country we shouldn’t even be dealing with the Ranucci affair and that Rai, unfortunately, remains that plaything so dear to politicians. I’d rather not concern myself with these August trifles, but with world events. I can only recount my own experience. As soon as I joined Rai, going abroad was every journalist’s dream. At the BBC, correspondents are treated like monuments. Here, we’re just navel-gazing’. When Ranucci received Rai’s offer to move to Cairo, he replied that ‘perhaps they’re hoping I’ll end up like Regeni’, rather than saying, as a journalist, that he would seek the truth about Regeni, that if they gave him ‘Report Egypt…’. Once upon a time, only a correspondent could aspire to the role of director, and a posting abroad was a necessary step on the career ladder. Rai now has 11 foreign bureaus and 22 correspondents abroad. The most recently opened bureau was in Buenos Aires, assigned to Stefania Battistini, a Tg1 journalist, who, like Ranucci, is under police protection and has been threatened by the Russians, who have issued an arrest warrant against her. Rai alone has one correspondent in Nairobi (Valerio Cataldi), as many as three in Brussels (Donato Benedicenti, Marilù Lucrezio and Mauro Giliberti), whilst in New York the head of the bureau is Marco Valerio Lo Prete, and a second is being sought via a job vacancy. Rai, like the newspapers, is also making cuts, and foreign coverage is increasingly under pressure: there used to be three journalists in America; in Berlin, following Rino Pellino’s retirement, only Barbara Gruden remains. In America, young Rai journalists complain, a member of the Unirai union – the right-wing union that has replaced Usigrai as the dominant force – could soon be sent there. Caprarica says that only ‘foreign correspondence offers you those exhilarating moments a journalist dreams of’. Antonio Di Bella reported on the Bataclan attacks, and Giovanni Floris’s success is due to his reports from America during the 11 September attacks. At Rai, foreign correspondence is shunned because they prefer studio-based presenting. Piero Marrazzo has found a new lease of life in Jerusalem, and even Gennaro Sangiuliano, who fell from grace (and has now returned to Naples), has in truth been reborn in Paris: ‘I left because I was very close to retirement’. He reveals that he will be publishing a new book on France, for Mondadori, entitled La fine della grandeur, and if he’d been in Egypt, he replies, “I would have written about pharaohs and dictatorships. Correspondence is exhilarating, and in my own small way I’ve tried my hand at it, just as Di Bella, Giulio Borrelli and all the former editors did. My favourite remains, of course, Prezzolini. He was the America correspondent for *Il Resto del Carlino*, Cavalier Monti’s newspaper, but he was also a great friend of Mario Missiroli. When Missiroli was appointed editor of *Il Corriere*, everyone assumed that Prezzolini would move to *Il Corriere*.” Prezzolini stayed at *Il Resto del Carlino* because Missiroli did not want to snub the publisher, Monti. Sangiuliano recounts the episode: “He secured a pay rise from Resto del Carlino and began writing literary columns for the Corriere. If I were Ranucci…”. According to reports, Lavitola has already accepted Rai’s invitation and agreed to this arrangement: the Cheope Bistrot in Cairo and an evening programme, Il Fatto di Al Ranucci, featuring a pyramid of clams.