Sunday,
February 04, 2007
Berlusconi
Profile: He makes the Gags, She sheds the Tears
The
ANNOTICO Report
Sunday
Telegraph
Guardian
Unlimited
By William
Langley,
January 4, 2007
He has the money, she has the
looks. He makes the gags, she sheds the tears
....Berlusconi is back.Not back in office. Nor, yet, back in court. But most certainly back in the headlines.
Plastered across the front page
of La Repubblica, the
Short and balding, with the ingratiating smirk of a tip-hungry Neapolitan waiter, 70-year-old Berlusconi is no one's idea of a born romancer. Until you see him in action. He refuses to eat garlic lest it impairs the deadly allure of his presence, and once claimed that the guilt engendered by infidelity had made his hair fall out. Last year, he opened an election rally by pushing his speech notes aside and admiring the legs of the women in the front row. Silvio's response to his wife's complaints was, nevertheless, conciliatory. "Your dignity should not be an issue," he promptly wrote back. "I will guard it like the precious thing it is. Forgive me, however, I beg of you, and take this public testimony of private pride that submits to your anger as an act of love. One among many. A huge kiss. Silvio."
So far, so
entertaining. But what did it all
mean?
At its core though, the battle of the Berlusconis highlighted two related things; how much duller political life is without Silvo; and the peculiar nature of his marriage.
"We now have an abysmally boring government," explains Giuliano Ferrara, editor of the conservative Il Foglio, and a friend of the Berlusconis, "and suddenly, out of nowhere, there is this explosion of vitality and, OK, weirdness, that gets the heart pumping. People miss that style. It may not be healthy, but it's Italian."
On the face of it, the Berlusconis should be the complete package. He has the money, she has the looks. She studies philosophy, he watches football. He tells the gags, she sheds the tears. It was Silvo's supposedly oily overtures to two glamorous women MPs from his Right-wing Forza Italia party that triggered Veronica's outburst last week, yet by all accounts the couple have existed in a state of acute marital tension for most of their 27 years together.
'We are as different as night and
day," Veronica, 50, admitted in an authorised
biography published two years ago. She further revealed that she had never
voted for Silvio (apparently being of a Leftist
inclination) and confirmed the impression that the couple
spend little time together. He lives, for the most part, in grand
apartments in
Even when they are together, she complained, Silvio spends all his time on the telephone. "We will be in the countryside, looking at a beautiful sunset, and Silvio will have his mobile glued to his ear," she sighed. "Even at Christmas dinner he will take a mouthful of turkey and start talking on the phone." Not that love's last embers have died. During his first premiership, Silvio boasted that he sent his wife flowers every day. He even produced the florists' bills to prove it. Only later did it emerge that Veronica never received them. Someone else did. "She considered it humiliating," wrote biographer Maria Latella, "that flowers he had sent to another woman were attributed to her."
That their marriage has,
nevertheless, survived is because of the foundations it was built on. For all
the couple's current wealth (Silvio is listed by
Forbes magazine as the 30th richest man in the world, with a #6 billion
fortune) they come from humble beginnings, and share a refreshing disdain for
the pomposity and formalities of public life. Veronica was born Raffaela Bartolini in
Berlusconi was a bank clerk's
son from
As a pairing, the Berlusconis could barely exist outside
For all this, a large part of
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