Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has long had a reputation as one of the world's most charismatic and irreverent politicians -- known for his grandiosity, absurd gaffes, and sustained devotion to la dolce vita. But we might look back on 2009 as the year when his behavior finally turned the corner into farce. The self-made billionaire, now in his third term at the helm of Europe's fourth-largest economy, landed smack in the center of sex and payoff scandals ludicrous even by his own opera buffa standards. There were Mafioso and mistresses and prostitutes and teenagers, nude photos and possibly orgies -- all dutifully reported by a riveted press. But 2009, there were also signs of that symbiotic media relationship heading awry, suggesting that soon, farce might become something more tragic.
Berlusconi's media saturation is reaching Britney Spears-type highs, his orange face plastered across newsstands from Rome to Beijing. Consider, for instance, the constant coverage of his three ongoing corruption trials. This month, a mafia strongman alleged that for years Berlusconi -- who owns an enormous media, publishing, and financial conglomerate -- had been the banker to the Sicilian mob. In February, David Mills, the former husband of a British parliamentarian, received 54 months in jail for accepting a $600,000 bribe to lie for Berlusconi in a court of law (a charge Il Cavaliere, as he is known in the Italian press, will have to answer). These travails ginned up hundreds of articles a month.
But in 2009, the bigger stories centered elsewhere in Berlusconi's pants than his wallet. In April -- just in time for the L'Aquila G-8 conference -- Italy buzzed with the news that the prime minister had attended the 18th birthday party of an aspiring glamour model, Noemi Letizia. She later gave an interview revealing that she calls Berlusconi "papi" or "daddy" and said that he told her he would take care of her career.
This earned Berlusconi public reprimands from his wife and the Roman Catholic Church, further stoking the media fire. Veronica Lario, who has been married to Berlusconi for nearly 20 years, said she could no longer live with his "cavorting with minors." (A few months later the tabloids reported that advisers had encouraged him to seek treatment for sex addiction.) She filed for divorce, topping it off by publishing an open letter deriding his choice of buxom, young, unqualified women (for example, a Miss Italy contestant) for posts in the European parliament.
Berlusconi did not deign to correct the church, which published an editorial castigating his unbecoming behavior. But he did take to the press to bash his wife and offer a shrugging sort of apologia: "I am not a saint. You've all understood that."
This was just one of several such incidents. A few weeks after the glamour model/jilted wife brouhaha, the Spanish newspaper El Pais printed photographs of numerous women sunning themselves topless at Berlusconi's mansion in Sardinia -- along with former Czech Republic Prime Minister Mirek Topolank, who prefers sunbathing nude.
In the fall came the publication of Gradisca, Presidente -- or Take Your Pleasure, Prime Minister, a book by a former high-end prostitute, Patrizia D'Addario. She reveals that she engaged in relations with the prime minister on the night of Barack Obama's election and participated in, well, sexy parties at his residence as well. "I'd found myself in a harem," she wrote of one encounter. "He was on the couch and all of us, 20 girls, were at his disposition.... Having been an escort I thought I'd seen a few things, but this I'd never seen. 20 women for one man." In response, Berlusconi scoffed that he had brought a "new morality" to Italian politics. (Indeed.)
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