Ranucci’s followers, fear not: ‘Report’’s’ approach remains the same even without him

There it was, plain for all to see: the cure for the anaemia afflicting Italian storytellers with their sluggish sagas. We had not previously grasped its artistic aspects and used to call that exciting hybrid – which combines mystery and fantasy, political ideology and spy stories, plus just the right pinch of puzzle-solving – ‘investigative journalism’: complete with a few unsolved riddles and the inevitable ‘connect the dots’ column. The astute reader will have realised that we are alluding to a six-letter word with very, very upright letters, because anyone who utters it thinks of a ‘straight back’ – a prerogative that, from the very outset on 8 November last, the first episode of the thirtieth series, the programme ‘Report’ has claimed as its exclusive right within the Rai universe. Or on the planet tout court.

A moment of commemoration was expected – but did not materialise – for the country’s most award-winning journalist, the presenter whose programme was axed following the Lavitola affair. The summer drama, as we know, cost Sigfrido Ranucci his job: officially he’s now at Rainews, although he’s seen more often in theatres than in the newsroom, on his tireless tour which may one day include yet another of his many personal records (8 November was, in fact, Guinness World Records Day).

The Report team, led by Claudia Di Pasquale and Daniele Piervincenzi, has hit the ground running after a horrendous summer – the mere mention of which brought tears to the eyes of the former and, we imagine, a sigh of relief from the latter, as the season of hunting down the intruder – namely him – has finally come to an end. The 6.6 per cent audience share for the opening episode marked a sharp drop compared with the same episode last year, which soared to over 9 per cent thanks to the bomb that, as it later transpired, their friend Valter had arranged to be delivered to Sigfrido a few days earlier. It cannot be ruled out that the new line-up is also suffering from the curse of the super-journalist’s die-hard followers – ‘my people’ – who had sworn: ‘We’ll never watch “Report” without you again.’ It’s a shame, because “Report” without Ranucci is just like Ranucci’s “Report”. A postmodern masterpiece.

The main feature on 8 November, which began with the Lavitola case and then shifted focus to the Vittoria Shipyard in Adria, contained every one of the evocative elements to which fans of the programme have become accustomed. This isn’t the sort of thing you can just cobble together, as if it were just any of Maurizio De Giovanni’s quarterly novels. For the Sunday investigative programmes on Rai 3, more complex ingredients are required, along with the same care as that taken by someone preparing ‘minestra maritata’ – the soup made with four different meats, five or six types of vegetables, cheese, herbs and a great deal of love for cooking. Every stage must be attended to with patience; otherwise, some of the flavour will be lost during cooking. Unfortunately, this time on ‘Report’ it seems that’s exactly what happened: whether it was tracchiolella or escarole, a carrot or a pig’s trotter, the ‘Lavitola’ ingredient has evaporated from the narrative of the investigative report; it vanished following the accusation of attempted misdirection, with which he sought to divert Ranucci’s reporters towards the Israeli secret services to cover up the motive (and the instigator) behind the bomb attack in Pomezia, outside the presenter’s (first) home.

Beginning with Valter, the narrative does away with him, forgets about him, takes a different turn and allows him only to make a vague reappearance towards the end, yet offers no explanation as to how or why. Thus, whilst correspondent Daniele Autieri delved into a convoluted script entangled in the mysteries of the shipyard, the questions that have been awaiting answers since early July remained unanswered: the real motive behind the bomb, the reasons why Sigfrido did not turn on Valter, the reasons why the magistrates have not yet (or no longer) questioned him, what was in the deleted chats between the two, the African business dealings, and so on and so forth.

Watching television from Rebibbia, Lavitola himself must have been surprised that, for once, they did not put him centre stage – as befits the mastermind with a criminal past described by Ranucci’s illustrious colleagues over recent months, from Saviano to Formigli to Santoro. Perhaps the team at ‘Report’ chose not to dwell on the scourge, and perhaps it was better – to put it in Roman terms – to turn it into a bit of a racket. With Lavitola absent from the main course, the issue of truffles (and this is no joke) was included on the programme’s opening menu, with a report on illegal imports ‘which casts a shadow over the entire Italian supply chain’. Fish was also featured – not from the Cefalù Bistrò, but from the sea choked with plastic – because, in short, a law passed by the Draghi government has not yet been implemented by the Meloni government.

And yet, thanks to fish and truffles, Report Reloaded showed some leniency towards viewers, because after just a few minutes of the report on the Cantiere, any viewer with intelligence slightly below average – such as the writer of this piece (though even those of us less gifted still pay the Rai licence fee) – could no longer quite grasp what was being discussed. For those who did not witness the broadcast live, here is the official summary tweeted on X: “A web of secret services, business tycoons, politics and figures close to the clans is swirling around what has for months been one of the leads pursued by the Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office in the search for the assailants of Sigfrido Ranucci. A story that stretches from Veneto through Campania and reaches as far abroad as the pharaonic castle on the Black Sea, considered by many to be Vladimir Putin’s undeclared palace.” Apart from Palantir and the Eye of Sauron, nothing was missing.

If it is true, as a well-known theory suggests, that at most six degrees separate all human beings, the meticulous reporter from “Report” glided all the way from the Cefalù restaurant to Vladimiro the Ogre’s Castle. Or perhaps he stumbled there. Explaining how he managed it, however, proves far more difficult—at least for those uninitiated in the esoteric depths of investigative journalism, who found themselves tangled up in the Gaddian labyrinth of the investigation—albeit one pleasantly presented with the tried-and-tested stylistic elements: but amidst unsettling music, hidden cameras and a syncopated rhythm, there came a point when even the obvious connections no longer made sense. Our heads were spinning, aided by the typical daze of a November Sunday spent slumped on the sofa amidst Lavitola’s disappearance, the booking of a ship, the machine-gunners in the shipyard’s warehouse, an airport project in Polesine or perhaps in Grazzanise, an ambiguous cameo for Crosetto, a sacked managing director, an accountant filmed surreptitiously, the audio attributed to a secret service agent that would fit perfectly with the timeless television staple of anonymous, hooded figures interviewed in the dim light. Were it not for the fact that ‘Report’ is ‘Report’ and has its own little bit of tradition, one might even suspect these were mere gimmicks. One might even say that if this is investigative journalism, we haven’t understood what fiction is. Without harbouring any ill will, we prefer to confess that in that labyrinth of faces and documents, amidst symphonic background music and intermittent conjectures, we lost our way – purely due to our own cognitive fallacy – on the journey between Adria, Moldova and the Black Sea. Had an interlocutor suddenly requested a summary, we would have managed no more than a few key words: Lavitola (who knows!), the Israeli intelligence services, a ship, London, Zagaria, Fratelli d’Italia (always present), minister, Polesine, Chisinau & Cicciano. Such incoherent utterances might nonetheless have carried sufficient plausibility; had Autieri suddenly produced a document implying the implicit involvement of the Three Wise Men, or an audio recording featuring the voice of the Befana, it would not have seemed implausible. Just like with ghost stories, you just need to get into the right frame of mind for even a hardened cynic to go to sleep with the light on: it’s the suspension of disbelief that stirs up genuine emotions (hats off and the usual special mention to the programme’s editors).

Nonetheless, by the crack of dawn last Monday, the soup served with a side of illegal truffles and plastic fish (a far cry from the shelled clams at the Cefalù Bistrò) had more or less been digested by the million-plus viewers, whether die-hard fans or merely curious onlookers. If Ranucci ever felt betrayed as a man by his editorial team – remember the ‘quoque tu, Mottola!’ from his most devoted fans – he will have been reassured as a colleague: his narrative devices live on as if he were still there, with his ruler and marker pen, sketching out fixed-target outlines and theorems on the editorial board. One of these, for example, explains – though it may already have been common knowledge – that YouTubers try to make money from their content. Simone Ruzzi, known as Cicalone, is no exception; he was accompanied by a reporter in the opening episode of “Report” on one of his infamous hunts for pickpockets on the capital’s underground.

The background is straightforward: for some time in the pre-Cicalonian era, hundreds of passengers who were strangers to one another—though initially regarded as visionaries—reported with conviction that they had been relieved of cash, credit cards and smartphones by organised gangs of specialists. While the authorities took time to ascertain that this was not a case of mass hysteria, and that private initiatives were indeed flourishing, offering glimpses of adventure to citizens and tourists plagued by boredom, Cicalone scoured train carriages and stations to disrupt the daily toil of these crooks. He inflicted more damage on the professional thieves than a local transport strike on a Friday, and there is no doubt that he pursued financial gain to fuel his own zeal—a zeal otherwise explainable only by the bizarre vocation of a moody troublemaker. The fact remains that, in the end, the sheer scale of the phenomenon (it is unclear whether this refers more to the pickpockets or to Cicalone himself) led to the deployment of a dedicated police unit tasked with duties that were often merely ceremonial, such as the polite escort of pickpockets back to the surface. Sensitive to the plight of this much-maligned group and to Cicalone’s intrusiveness – which violates their privacy – ‘Report’ focused more on the YouTuber’s business – described as a ‘jackal’ because he ‘turns urban decay into millions of clicks’ – than on that of the petty thieves. The programme’s correspondents probably spend more time out and about in the wider world than on Line A during rush hour, when the average passenger’s level of empathy towards those who slip their fingers into other people’s bags drops to an unseemly low.

Aldo Grasso is far too quick to claim the moral high ground when he complains that the questions posed by the ‘Report’ journalists are already framed by a preconceived argument, or that they adopt the tone of a ‘moral police force’. He insists on viewing it as a mere investigative programme, whilst the concept of ‘Putin’s Castle’ or the mise en abyme by correspondent Luca Bertazzoni – who filmed Cicalone, who in turn was filming the pickpockets – confirm that it is something more. Think of it as an open-ended visual work that can in turn generate literature. Indeed, the writer Fulvio Abbate, a regular at Cefalù, has already published a short novel on Amazon entitled La bomba. The blurb reads: “A mysterious bomb explodes in Rome, outside the home of a journalist who hosts a popular television programme exposing ‘civil’ wrongdoings. A perpetually dissatisfied restaurateur with a turbulent past, a ‘dear friend’ of the reporter, is soon accused of being the mastermind behind the attack.” It is in fiction that Lavitola finds his new incarnation. He simply cannot disappear.