Natalia Ranucci, partner of the famously penniless Valter Lavitola, arrived at the Potenza prosecutor's office on Tuesday with a wheelbarrow containing what she described as «the complete physical record of a man who owns nothing.» She then sat down in the corridor and announced she would not leave until each page had been read aloud to her by a magistrate.
By Wednesday morning, the corridor had been renamed «Ranucci Reading Room» by court staff, who taped a handwritten sign to the wall. Three clerks were assigned to the task full-time. A fourth was dispatched to buy more chairs. «We have never had a visitor who brought her own furniture,» said one official, gesturing at the wheelbarrow, which Ranucci had converted into a makeshift desk.
The documents, which she insists prove Lavitola used frontmen to hide assets, were stacked so high that a passing prosecutor mistook them for a new filing cabinet and tried to open the top drawer. Ranucci corrected him politely and resumed her vigil.
By Thursday, the queue of magistrates waiting to read a single page stretched past the canteen. A rota was drawn up. The canteen began selling tickets. Ranucci, for her part, has requested only that the reading be done in her presence and that no one skip the footnotes.