Sewage fumes, forest fires and a little politics encroach on Blair idyll

The Prime Minister and Mrs Blair are expected at Olbia airport in Sardinia this morning en route to Silvio Berlusconi's holiday home, Villa Certosa, where they will be guests of the Italian Prime Minister for two days. But the Blairs may not care to linger too long out of doors.

The Prime Minister and Mrs Blair are expected at Olbia airport in Sardinia this morning en route to Silvio Berlusconi's holiday home, Villa Certosa, where they will be guests of the Italian Prime Minister for two days. But the Blairs may not care to linger too long out of doors.

The villa, to Mr Berlusconi's chagrin, finds itself in the firing line of the pestilential fumes from an antiquated and inadequate local sewage works.

"Some days ago," a local told La Repubblica newspaper, "the stink was appalling.'' Exasperated by this absurd threat to his idyll, Mr Berlusconi has been trying to bully the local authority into building a new plant at a distant location double-quick, with Mr Berlusconi paying half.

But the Consorzio Porto Rotondo, the local authority, refused to stump up more than €150,000 (£100,600) - €50,000 short of what Mr Berlusconi wants. He broke off negotiations on principle. So the threat of a blanketing stench remains.

Meanwhile, the Mistral, the viciously hot Mediterranean summer wind, has been whipping up forest fires around Olbia, close to Mr Berlusconi's estate, and menacing the town's industrial area. The flames are not expected to engulf the villa, but the wind may make it risky for him to pilot his guests around the estate in a golf cart, as is his habit.

In addition to such nuisances, Mr Blair is also walking into a political storm. Last week the new president of the Sardinia region, Renato Soru, enacted a decree freezing all new construction within 2km of the coast for three months. Now Sardinia is bitterly divided between environmentalists and ordinary citizens on the one hand, delighted at the initiative, and property developers and their political allies, seething at this sudden strike against their efforts to smother the coastline in concrete.

As guests of Italy's most famous property developer, whose recent addition to his Sardinian estate, including the notorious "James Bond tunnel'', is alleged by his political opponents to be illegal, Mr Blair finds himself not necessarily on the side of the angels.

The privacy of the Blairs' two-day stay is underlined on all sides and emphasised by the absence of Paolo Bonaiuti, Mr Berlusconi's spokesman, on a sailing holiday somewhere between Alaska and California.

Yet it would be unthinkable that Europe's two firmest allies of the United States on Iraq (since the election defeat in the spring of Spain's Jose Maria Aznar, a previous guest at Villa Certosa) could spend two days in each other's company without having wide-ranging political discussions.

The intensified threat of al-Qa'ida-related terrorism, and Italy's efforts to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants from Libya, who have been arriving by boat in the hundreds during last week, are topics expected to be at the top of the agenda.

Ill-matched though they may seem, Mr Blair coming from the left and Mr Berlusconi from the right, achieving a common view has never been more important. Both men have no firm allies left in Europe but each other.