A quarter of an hour passed, while the audience continued to flow into the Auditorium of the Cagliari Conservatory. On stage tonight, Sigfrido Ranucci embraced his audience for the 6 pm performance—necessary after the 9 pm show immediately sold out—of "Diary of a Trapeze Artist," a stage version of the book "The Choice."
And this is precisely the verb that runs through the show: "to choose." Choosing to inform at any cost, like the thirty journalists who have died in Italy since the war and the three hundred who fell in Gaza. Choosing to do so despite the 516 threats hanging over Italian journalists, a grim European record for a country the journalist calls sick.
Ranucci intertwines personal memory and collective history. There's Roberto Morrione, mentor and director who in 1990 chose to expose the ties between the CIA and P2, forcing Andreotti to report to Parliament, and who had "the courage to attack live the most important country in the world, a sign of love for the truth." The US attacked RAI. But the truth soon proved Italian journalists right. Then the Twin Towers, Afghanistan, Iraq. And Fallujah, in 2004. War crimes filmed in infrared because "death seems less cruel" that way, white phosphorus used against civilians while two hundred embedded journalists reported on another war.
“What good is the gaze if it doesn’t question?” he asks, remembering Michele, the homeless man nicknamed “See See,” who somehow taught him to see.
The story unfolds amidst small moral epiphanies: the taxi driver, who had been the Tanzi family's bodyguard, helps uncover where one hundred million in paintings were hidden, later sold at auction for sixty million. He demands 3% as a reward. "Some have a price, and some have a value," Ranucci comments.
And then the abyss. The investigation into Tosi and his potential blackmail: nineteen complaints filed against Report for thirty-six minutes of reporting, the accusation of fabricating dossiers with false evidence, the bitterness that for the first time leads him to contemplate suicide. Tosi will be convicted of defamation.
The accusation of being a Chinese intelligence agent, then a Russian one, then an enemy of the Kremlin. The anonymous letters and the friendship and protection of the late Franco Di Mare. The desire to discredit. And kill. Here the applause becomes emotional.
The "trapeze artist's theory" brings the aura of his mentor, Morrione, full circle: "When you feel you're in the crosshairs of someone who wants to knock you down, jump forward onto the other trapeze: it will be harder to hit you." And a quote from Lee Masters: "You can't know good if you don't know evil."
Ranucci chose not to fall and to continue exploring evil. The Cagliari crowd stood by him, giving him a prolonged standing ovation.
