UFO Info Week-End

Before the general election of 2001 – which he won by a landslide – Berlusconi

Before the general election of 2001 – which he won by a landslide – Berlusconi commissioned and published an autobiographical memoir about himself entitled An Italian Story and had copies distributed to 12 million homes throughout the land. Behind the mansion’s high, ornate gates vanished Veronica Lario and her small children; in the lap, one must assume, of fantastic luxury, but lost to the world.Whatever happened at the Villa Arcore? Were there scenes, tears, fights, furious recriminations? Or merely the hushed bustle of a large, smoothly functioning domestic machine in the aching vacancy that opened up once the coming billionaire had settled his trophy wife and returned to the business matters that obsessed him?Berlusconi’s elaborate security systems and Veronica’s legendary discretion ensure that the record is thin. Two more children, Eleonora and Luigi, followed later.The same year that he met Veronica, Berlusconi managed to buy at a knockdown price an astonishing 17th-century country house outside Milan, the Villa Arcore, and it was there, after disentangling himself from his first marriage, that he installed his new love. A year and a half before Berlusconi finally left his first wife, Veronica bore him their first child, Barbara. Veronica, real name Miriam Bartolini, had recently taken her first, faltering steps into the world of movies – in her first film role, in a horror film titled Unsane, she was first disembowelled, then decapitated by a fiend with an axe – but Berlusconi whisked her away from all that and set her up in a villa in Milan, with weekend escapes to places such as San Moritz and Portofino. The year was 1980, and Berlusconi, a property tycoon, was still 12 years away from launching himself into politics He had been married for 15 years and had two children. During the course of the play Veronica was required to strip off: Silvio liked what he saw, and went backstage to convey his admiration.

“It seems an ideal situation, don’t you think?”There is therefore irony in the fact that Berlusconi first clapped eyes on his future wife, then a hopeful young actress, at a production of a play called The Magnificent Cuckold. “My daughter Barbara has enrolled in the philosophy faculty of San Raffaele University, where Cacciari teaches,” she told the reporter with no prompting. “Sometimes I can even see him on television!”And obliquely she added her own endorsement to her husband’s amazing “cuckold” declaration. “Do you get to see him or speak to him on the telephone?”"There is not only the telephone,” she responded, smiling. But last week, surprised at a performance of Macbeth in the city of Piacenza, she allowed her reserve to slip a little “Your husband is a very busy man,” the journalist noted. However ravenous the world of Italian gossip may be for any tit-bits she cares to throw its way, she is not one to feed it.

The interview went like this:Q: Berlusconi said the Danish Prime Minister was more handsome than you.A: Is he crazy?Q: He said that he would introduce him to his wife.A: He’s crazy!Q: I must ask you if you are acquainted with that lady.A: But what are you asking? This is the most idiotic nonsense…For her part, Veronica Lario reacted to the humiliation dumped on her by her husband with the stoical silence that has long been her trademark. As well as an outrageous slur on the woman he has routinely called “my great love.”Massimo Cacciari, tracked down at a book launch the same day, appeared thunderstruck by the remark. Like other stunning remarks by the Italian Prime Minister – such as his comparison the other day, for example, of a German MEP to a guard in a Nazi concentration camp, which sparked a huge diplomatic kerfuffle and an unprecedented rupture in Italian-German relations – it seemed like a deliberate and pointless own goal. What on earth was the Italian talking about?Berlusconi was alluding to rumours doing the rounds that he had been cuckolded by a bearded Marxist philosopher called Massimo Cacciari, a former mayor of Venice and a university professor.

“I think I will introduce him to my wife, because he is even more handsome than Cacciari.” At his side, Rasmussen’s own smile froze on his face. With that cocksure, cruise-ship-crooner grin of his, which close Silvio watchers have learnt to identify as a harbinger of his most unconscionable clangers, Berlusconi remarked, “Rasmussen is the most handsome prime minister in Europe.” The grin twitched a little wider, out came those uncannily gleaming teeth. Last October during Denmark’s turn at the rotating European Union presidency, Denmark’s dashing young Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was in Rome for talks He and Silvio held a press conference. And although, unlike those incorrigible Anglo-Saxons, Italians like to fancy themselves too sophisticated to indulge in tittle-tattle about the sex lives of their masters, the dysfunctioning of the Berlusconi m?ge has lately grown too glaring for even them to ignore completely.It was Silvio himself who gratuitously exposed his marital problems to the glare of publicity. The chat over the clam chowder might have gotten a little too lively for Bush’s liking But Veronica always stays home. Maybe this time it was just as well: Veronica’s opposition to the Iraq war is a matter of record.