Rodolfo Ranni Born on October 31, 1937 in Fassana, a small town in Italy, near Trieste, an area that suffered during the Second World War. A special guest in Jey’s nights He remembered his childhood toys “They were grenades. They had to do with everything related to war.” That reality gave way to the story of one of the many traumatic events he experienced in his childhood.
“After the war, my friends and I would go out to play in the ditches and find grenades and gun charges.”he explained. The fun was throwing them into the fire because they didn’t know where they would go. “One day one of my friends found a grenade, pulled out the fuse and it exploded. He was the son of the village commissioner. It could have happened to me,” he told.
As he told his friend “The grenade exploded in his stomach, he was crossing the street and fell in the middle of the road with his guts spilling out. His mother appeared with a white sheet, not crying because people had no tears left at that moment, she took her son in her arms, covered him with the sheet and went home. I will never forget that image in the middle of the road.”
In 1947, when he was ten years old, he emigrated to Argentina with his parents and two brothers. They settled in the Retiro area and although Ranni was still a child, he got his first and scatological job: collecting his boss’s urine: “I had just arrived from Italy and on the corner of my house there was the Caporaleti bookstore. There was an old Italian man there and I went in to buy a Tita cookie.” he began his story.
As he recalled, the candy cost fifty cents. Thinking that if he worked there he wouldn’t be charged, he asked the owner if they needed an employee.He told me that he didn’t have a bathroom and that he peed in a bucket. If you want, your job would be to come every morning when you go to Plaza San Martín to skate, grab the bucket, throw the pee in the storm drain, rinse it and leave it behind me,” signed.
After explaining to him what the task consisted of, he asked him how much he wanted to earn: “I had no idea he was a boy who had just arrived from Italy, so I replied: “a Tita.” So my first salary was a cookie and that was also my first job.”
Another striking fact was the age at which he started smoking: five years old. “At that time, when you turned 18, your father allowed you to smoke in front of him at home. It was a cultural thing.”. Tobacco caught him: “When I was a kid, if I found a Tuscan on the street, I would go behind the dock and smoke it. I would roll cigarettes out of newspapers and dried leaves. People would ask me what I wanted for my birthday and I would ask for Chesterfield (a brand of cigarettes) without a filter. My brother never took to smoking, but I was a terrible thing.”
His father also smoked a lot, and he had several cartons stored in the closet. “Once I opened a box, grabbed a bundle, peeled off the band-aid, opened it, took out a cigarette, glued everything back together and put it back in the box.”he confessed to Jey. “My old man died wondering how the hell there were 19 cigarettes in a pack of 20.” Despite his addiction, he was able to quit and hasn’t smoked for 35 years.
As Gustavo Sofovich, Gerardo’s son is the producer of the programme, and guests often recall a moment shared with their father. Ranni filmed El desquite and En recuperación with Sofovich Sr. In a clinic on Córdoba Street they filmed a scene where Sofovich’s character appeared dead and Ranni had to see him.
“Gerardo was very serious playing the dead man, I approached him and said ‘to think that there are people who would pay for this to be true’. He started laughing so much that the scene was cut off. We repeated the take seven times and since he couldn’t stop laughing they sent us all to eat.” he told.
Towards the end of the show, Jey reminded her that she reached the final of Cantando por un sueño with Ileana Calabró and that she won. Although she assured that Ileana’s victory did not bother her, she slipped in an irony:“He brought so many tiramisu that they said we have to give him something.”
