Ranucci, the first TV presenter in Italian television to be sentenced in absentia

He was still in the newsroom until the day before yesterday; he even discussed the segments to be broadcast on Report, and the boxes (now numbering six) remain stacked there. Sigfrido Ranucci is the programme’s most prominent absentee, the first presenter in Italian television to be absent in absentia. Rai removed him at the end of August; Claudia Di Pasquale and Daniele Piervincenzi have already taken his place, but he continues to climb the stairs on Via Teulada as if the decision concerned someone else with the same name. He brings in the tips he receives by email, distributes them and proposes investigations. It seems that some of the editorial staff are listening to him. The other crosses the road, sits at the bar opposite and waits for him to leave. Among the tables, Ranucci suspects, there are even those who have long been eyeing his chair. He gave his life to Report, Sigfrido thinks, and he has no intention of handing the microphone back. The microphone, after all, will end up before a labour court judge at 11 this morning, who will have to decide whether to clip it back onto his unbuttoned shirt. In short, the judge will determine – perhaps today – who will actually present Report. At Mediaset, no judge would dream of putting Enrico Papi back at the helm of Sarabanda, or sending Alfonso Signorini back to Big Brother. At Rai, on the other hand, it has already happened that a judge drew up the programme schedule. “But it would still be surreal,” they say in the upper echelons. We shall see. Ranucci, appearing in court today, has just arrived from Sicily, where last night he was talking about his book in Palermo and Monreale (they even presented him with another award: the Mario Sconcerti. It’s his fifteenth), so the tour concludes with a morning session in court and will continue shortly with a statement in the Lavitola case (“love bomb / whose blast spares no friend”) and with summonses for two lawsuits filed against him: one by Giovanbattista Fazzolari, Undersecretary to the Prime Minister, and the other by Paolo Zampolli, Trump’s envoy to Italy.

Sued, Sigfrido sues. He has one hundred and fifty complaints ready, counted and set aside, one for every falsehood he has read in the newspapers, and when something is brought to his attention, he replies: ‘Wait, I’ll make a note of this one too.’ One hundred and fifty-one! ‘Report’, however, is his own creation, he says. He built it up over twenty years, he claims. He is not giving up. He has even planned the first five episodes of the new series, which begins on 8 November. There are reportedly seven or eight investigations ready in the pipeline: the Veneto banks and Zonin, the house of Juliet and Romeo, a story on Portofino and a wine aged underwater. In November, the absent presenter—labour court ruling or not—still plans to go on air, even if only through an investigative feature. He has asked Rai, which offered him three alternative roles, to let him return. But at the bar opposite the studios, in Via Teulada, they’re doing the maths differently. Ranucci is heading for retirement with about a year and a half’s worth of accrued holiday leave, which Rai does not usually pay out, preferring to keep the retiring employee on leave until they have used it all up. A favourable ruling, his colleagues over cappuccino reason, would be an excellent lever to get that paid out. Or to secure a post-retirement contract. And bring the matter to a close. But Ranucci protests: it is not the money that matters. Meanwhile, in the office of the defendant in absentia—Rai’s most ‘present’ absentee—the folder that Milena Gabanelli had been holding in the studio, and which she gave him when she handed over the presenting role, has reappeared among the papers. A sign of fate? In recent months, Sigfrido had already compared himself to Falcone, Moro and Regeni. Now he has confided to a colleague that his case “is like the Dreyfus affair”. The French captain, however, was eventually reinstated. “If that happens, we’ll throw ourselves into the Tiber,” says a correspondent for Report. That’s all from Via Teulada for now.