Battle of the Berlusconis: Italy's first couple at war over 'harem'
The Italian leader's wife has had enough of him using women as 'political costume jewellery'. And she's not afraid to say it
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Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi with his wife Veronica Lario at their Villa Madama residence in Rome
"In pictures: The Berlusconi Babes"
Silvio Berlusconi and Veronica Lario's second honeymoon is over. The rumour that, having already packed his cabinet with slender beauties, the Italian Prime Minister was grooming a new harem replete with showgirl, beauty queen, reality show starlet and singer to run in the European elections has elicited a ferocious response from his wife.
Taking the unusual step of directly emailing the Italian news agency Ansa, Mrs Berlusconi lambasted the Freedom People party's plans for the June poll as "shameless rubbish" and "entertainment for the emperor".
"What's happening today behind a front of bodily curves and female beauty is grave", she wrote, adding that female politicians should not be used like "pieces of costume jewellery" to attract votes.
It was the fiercest rebuke that Mr Berlusconi's second wife, a former actress celebrated for her independent views, has delivered in public. "I want to make it clear that I and my children are victims and not accomplices in this situation," she said. "We must endure it and it causes us pain."
Her husband tried his usual tactic of blaming the whole kerfuffle about the "showgirl candidates" on the machinations of left-wing journalists, who had duped "Signora Veronica" – the chillily formal equivalent of the British Prime Minister referring to Sarah as "Mrs Brown".
But soon afterwards Mr Berlusconi threw diplomacy to the winds and went on the counter-attack. "I will carry out the election campaign with these so-called showgirls at my side," he declared, "and they will talk as well as me and I will spell out their qualifications and what they have done in life up to now".
Choosing young women as candidates, he said, was a way "to revitalise our political class with people who are cultured, well prepared and who can guarantee that they will be present at every vote". Enough, he said, "of the evil-smelling, badly-dressed people" that other parties put up.
The "showgirl" furore had focused on four women: Camilla Ferranti, a trained ballerina; Eleonora Gaggioli, an actress; Cristina Ravot, a professional singer; and Barbara Matera, a television announcer.
Ms Matera was the only one of the "Berlusconi babes" to end up on the official candidate list when it was published yesterday. Whether this was because of Mrs Berlusconi's outburst or because the other three women had never been in serious contention, remained unclear.
It was speculated that what had really enraged Mrs Berlusconi was the emergence of an 18-year-old who calls the Prime Minister "Daddy".
On Sunday, Mr Berlusconi drove to the outskirts of Naples and popped in to the 18th birthday party of a pretty blonde girl called Noemi, giving her a gold pendant set with diamonds.
Why? "Because he's a friend of the family," Noemi, sitting at her parents' kitchen table, told Corriere della Sera. "He's known me since I was teeny-weeny. For me it's normal to see him, but I didn't expect him at the party, and I didn't tell my friends ... I've never even told them about Daddy."
Daddy? The Italian media never probes too harshly into the private lives of the rich and famous, and so the unspoken questions about Noemi and her mother remained exactly that – unspoken. But Mrs Berlusconi, who has three children with her husband, left no room for doubt that the development was unexpected. "What do I think about it? It was a big surprise for me," she said. "Also because he never came to the 18th birthday parties of any of his children, even though he was invited."
This latest outbreak of war in the Berlusconi household ends the truce that followed their last marital rupture. In the summer of 2007, Mr Berlusconi was photographed with three beauties on his lap at his villa in Sardinia, telling a lawyer-turned-showgirl called Mara Carfagna that "I would marry you like a shot if I wasn't married already".
This attack of public goatishness jolted Mrs Berlusconi into publicly demanding an apology. She duly got it, and Mr Berlusconi, who counts on millions of staunch Italian Catholics to vote for him, went to considerable lengths – in terms of public relations, if nothing else – to mend his bridges. He was photographed walking hand-in-hand with his wife and enjoying a family holiday at his Sardinian villa. Carefully posed shots of the couple now appear in the gossip magazines.
Nobody, however, is fooled. Mr Berlusconi lives his life by his own satyr-like rules, as he has done for decades. Carlo Caracciolo, the founding publisher of La Repubblica newspaper who knew Mr Berlusconi when he was a property developer, recalled how he often had breakfast with Mr Berlusconi in Milan, "and every time he brought a different girl. It was a sort of obsession with him."
The courtier-like discretion of the Italian media means it is impossible to know, and difficult even to imagine, what Mr Berlusconi's life must be like up close. Tantalising hints of obsessive behaviour appear: the plying of girls with expensive gifts, the bizarre preoccupation with finding them acting jobs, the heavy-handed jocularity of the remark he made to Mara Carfagna when she entered parliament, announcing that in his party, the boss enjoyed "droit de seigneur", the right to deflower the virgins.
Does he mean all of it? Or any of it? Is Mr Berlusconi's life a succession of priapic encounters with young beauties? The rumours to that effect have done him no harm politically. Indeed his ability to embody the fantasies of the ordinary Italian male – to be as rich as Croesus but as dirty-minded as the guy at the bar; to be ageing but ageless – offers one clue to his enduring appeal. He's the living legend.
And still the reality remains elusive. Is his life the endless Neronian orgy some imagine? Or might it all get desperately lonely when the aides and bodyguards leave? He dropped one clue in April 2006, on the eve of his only election loss in the past 10 years. He had done his own straw poll, he announced, and seven out of the nine sex chatline girls he had spoken to were going to vote for him.
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Comments
I really think it's absurd that here, in Italy, prime Minister's second wife is the only people who protests
against the Eupean election campaign with showgirls.
A sleazzy would be dictator.
anne
That Silvio Berlusconi's wife has taken up the challenge and speaks out against her husband's philandering politics is unique, for women, universally, have been taught that like children they are to be seen and not heard--and ancient cultural miscreation, but one that is a part of the "Playboy" (Hugh Hefner) mentality. Such an absurdity that a ballerina or "reporter" or model or actress has any potential to do society good is rampants (Peru has, like Italy, a prostitute, a volleyball star, etc in its Congress, while the USA had Sonny Bono and other mental midgets, aping the worse that sit in Parliament to collect a cheque without offering any substantial improvement or safeguards to society. Silvio Berlusconi will continue to have sex chatlines to hustle bimbos, but that speaks of the Italian mentality which is near neanderthal in reality. It is a sad day for Italy, Europe, and the world.
Just about all the young Italian women I know think he's a twat.
(p.s.: sorry for my English but anytime I read about SB I have a rush of blood to my head)
Berlusconi later (in 1989) sued three journalists for libel for writing articles hinting at his involvement in financial crimes. In court, he declared that he had joined the P2 lodge "only for a very short time before the scandal broke" and "he had not even paid the entry fee". Such statements conflicted with the findings of the parliamentary inquiry commission appointed to investigate the lodge's activity, with material evidence, and even with previous testimony of Berlusconi, all of which proved that he had actually been a member of P2 since 1978 and had indeed paid 100,000 Italian liras (52 Euros) as an entry fee. In 1990 the court of appeal of Venice found Berlusconi guilty of false testimony in front of the Court of Verona, however the court did not proceed to sentence because the wrongdoing had been extinguished by an amnesty passed in 1989. Berlusconi now controls the courts much like Mussolini, and is a threat to Italian democracy, made more odious by his selection of bimbos for his cabinet.
Marco Travaglio, a well-known journalist writing the history of all the trials in which Berlusconi is involved, is one of a few Italian intellectual still fighting against Berlusconi's media super-power.
His TV magazine "Anno Zero" (Year Zero), conducted by Michele Santoro, is the most important act of media opposition at the moment.
The program has been already under threat of closing down by Berlusconi and his employees.
"Good night and good luck!"
While Barrack Hussein Obama twitters and twists in consternation over what to do about the CIA documents showing the Ronald Rumfself, Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, W Bush, and others authorized (once listening to U California Professor John Yoo's endorsement of waterboarding) were implicit and explicit in their support of crimes against humanity--Berlusconi and Gelli are just beginning to follow the same road. They should all remember what the American Jurist on the Court at Nuremberg stated clearly in his clarion call for protecting democracy.
Robert Jackson, a man no less charismatic than Barack Obama, said it to the Germans against the backdrop of the smoldering ruins of World War II. Jackson was the chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, and the speech he gave was so powerful that it reduced his audience to tears. Never before had an American spoken as beautifully as Jackson. "The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated," Jackson said in his opening remarks. The hearts of the disenfranchised, the demoralized, the starved and the persecuted of the Nazi regime were behind the man who brought the surviving Nazi leaders to the gallows, just as the hearts of true Italians who love their land are rallying feignedly behind those who would stop the power quest of Berlusconi and Gelli.
facing the truth, italy nowadays is an incredibly under-cultured country, ignorance is everywhere. as an italian i find my society embarassing and the thought of what happened here in the renaissance or during the roman ages doesn't make me feel any better, it clearly has nothing to do with me, you or any of our fellow italians.
the media are playing an enormeous role in the worsening of this situation, which is great news for berlusconi, who is selling brainless politics to ignorant people. and as you said this doesn't make a good habitat for smart people looking for opportunities. as if it wasn't enough, the whole educational system here is let rotting.
berlusconi may claim italy will be the first country to get out of the crisis (oddly enough he stated the new richness doesn't lay in finance but in hard work and sweat - it's been like that for ages for me...), but the much more likely reality is that this is a country with no future so long as nothing changes.
should be finally out of this banana republic by september, for good. it feels bad to give up on the place you were born in and were you grew up, but after taking us away pride, culture, education and money they stole our hopes, too.
The grandeur that was Italy's has faded with the rage and roar of the fascists, and Berlusconi is but a retread of that warped wraper of history. Instead of investing in education, new industry, cultivating the arts, and making certain that all who can and wish to work have a job, he is offering the amusements of pretty faces and mindless places for his recuits to sit in. Berlusconi should be arrested for impersonating a mortal with a brain.
What the estimable Berlu is doing now is trying out his state of the art prosthesis on a bevy of opportunistic young beauties in his employ.
Think of it this way: the more Berlusconi practices his sexcraft on his "harem" the less he will be getting under the skin of Angela Merkel who for some reason seems to have little use for megalomaniacal Italian heads of state.
Trying to emulate for profit that which should otherwise be ignored.
Since the past few years, and especially in the past weeks, she criticized his husband's actions and morals with letters and statements sent to italian newspapers (most notably the letter sent to la Republica, the second biggest newpaper in italy, known for his center-left views) and to ANSA, the biggest news agancy in italy. Any time she had come to vent her feelings about the husband it was clear how she was making a statement on mr Berlusconi's poor behaviour, his lack of respect for his family, for her and for women. As one of the italian prime minister's closest person she thaught us lessons to be learned about him and his ways.
She made her disappointment clear when recalling, after mr Berlusconi's partecipation to the 18th birthday party of the daughter of a fellow politician, how he never attended his own kid's 18th birthday parties. Turning 18 in Italy means coming of age. She asked for public apoligies, too, when his husband said how he would immediatly marry Mara Carfagna if only he wasn't married already. The list could go on and on.
She even said she tried to "help him" and asked people around him "to do so, too, as you'd do with a person who's not ok. It's been vain." Very bold statements indeed, especially considering how mrs Lario has always kept herself out of the spotlight and even rarely ever appeared at his husband's side at public rallies and appearances. And very quitly she made the announcement, too: "After 30 years i bring down the curtain on my conjugal life, but i want to do so as a normal and respectable person, without clamor."
This really sounds like a pretty liberating decision for mrs Lario. A tough and brave one of course, but could indeed be the begining of a new life for her (who is, after all, 20 years mr Berlusconi's junior), after nearly three long decades relegated in her husband's shadow.