Part 2
For the past 15 years, Berlusconi's show-politics, his personalistic and plebiscitary disposition, his fascination as a generous and womanizing tycoon, have seduced the Italian voting and TV-watching masses with his jokes, sexist style, blunders, social rise, electoral triumphs, even the victories and signings of his football team (this week he froze the announcement of Kaka's transfer until Monday so as not to lose a single vote).
All this is a natural part of his a-political and a-cultural baggage, of his open and mundane populism, paradoxically rooted in a traditionalist and Catholic non-political non-program, vaguely inspired on "God, Country and Family". "And veline", it should be added.
Villa Certosa is il Cavaliere's most discrete status symbol, his not just nuclear shelter. It is his treasure, his best kept secret, the place where this nearly 73 year old man, arrogant and millionaire, congenial and media friendly, hosts his male and female friends, leads informal cabinet meetings, closes or prepares business dealings and political feats, smothers with attentions the leaders of the right from all over the world, watches over his chrysalises, sits his veline on his knees and promenades them on golf carts around the park, a militarized and Top-Secret area since 2006.
As Antonello Zappadu's photographs tell, Villa Certosa is also the place where the megalomaniac magnate, the excessive, comical character and pathological liar, forgets that he is a grandfather (and that he left the conjugal bedroom a decade ago), and becomes a macho once again, the sheik of the harem, Super Silvio, permatanned and operated upon (on his prostate as well), while Italy whispers that he takes too much Viagra and his doctors fear for his heart.
Villa Certosa is also the place where his Neapolitan friend Noemi Letizia was invited, just after her eighteenth birthday, to spend the New-Year holiday along with 30 other colleagues and a dozen of Berlusconism's grandees, nearly all of them in their seventies like him: gerontocracy and spectacular girls.
As the philosopher Paolo Flores d'Arcais says, "The question is not what happens or has happened at Villa Certosa, but rather what would have happened in the United States if it had become public knowledge that Obama had spent his Christmas holidays with thirty 18 year old cabaret stars and without his wife, or in Germany if they found out that Angela Merkel goes on vacation with 30 hot gigolos".
What matters, in the case of these young Italian women, is fulfilling a dream, reaching a goal: meeting Silvio and his powerful friends, working in television and maybe making it into politics, which in the country of the RAI and Mediaset, controlled by one man, amounts to the same thing.
Many of these young women have tragically limited themselves to embodying their parents' model, the conformism of the disenchanted post-68 generation which fell into mediocrity in front of the tv set during the eighties and nineties, watching the Christian-Democrats dissolve, Bettino Craxi go into exile, how the once brilliant Italian left became an oligarchic, boring and distant caste after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Some might find this vision of the world and social rise repugnant; to others it will seem practical and human. But, what better way to succeed in this Italy of television than being very, very close to the great boss of European, and perhaps world television?
Berlusconi, wrote Eugenio Scalfari, is the Sun King. In the words of a Sardinian politician, "If you get close to the sun, the sun enlightens and warms you". And according to another master journalist, Giancarlo Santalmessi, who has suffered the wrath of the conservatives, "Half of Italy works for Berlusconi, the other half whishes they did".
Going to Villa Certosa guarantees these girls their place under the sun, a phone number they can call, maybe a recommendation from the emperor, a raised thumb, a casting to go to upon their return to Rome or Milan, on Sunday night or Monday morning, after the long and fun nights, talking politics with Silvio, walking, going shopping at the Porto Rotondo mall (Papi pays, up to 1.500 Euros per girl), dancing frantically, maybe stripping motivated by alcohol rather than money, machismo of the worst kind.
It is not easy to be among the chosen ones, to make it to the vestal of Villa Certosa, insists a Sardinian politician, who prefers to remain anonymous for security reasons: "Those who go there are important, those who sleep there are very important, and those who spend the holidays are in Caesar's heart".
Caesar, who started out in real estate, has seven other villas in Sardinia, another one in Antigua, countless mansions in Rome and Milan, but Villa Certosa is the measure of all things. Even cabinet ministers are divided between those who go very often (like the quiet Gianni Letta), and those who have only been there once or have only gone to attend a cabinet (or board) meeting during the holidays.
Among the female ministers, Mara Carfagna, minister for Equal Opportunities, has been there the most, and she has proved her loyalty, as she has been the only one who has dared to defend his actions during the grotesque Noemigate. In her opinion, the attacks on Berlusconi are baseless and motivated by envy, because he is a "good" person.
For the girls, the best way to enter is through the old man's expert eye. As in the case of Noemi Letizia, Carfagna herself and hundreds of other girls. Noemi, a sweet girl who grew up in the surroundings of the Neapolitan mafia, wanted to be an artist. So she made herself a portfolio and sent it to an agency in Rome. Emilio Fede, a journalist at Canale 4 and close friend of Berlusconi's, picked it up, carried it under his arm, and left it carelessly on the table. His capo picked up the phone and dialed the girl's mobile. He told her she had an angelical gaze and that she had to stay that way, pure.
That was in October, tells Gino, the construction worker who was Noemi's boyfriend until Papi came along, in an interview with La Repubblica. Soon afterwards, Noemi was seen at a fashion party held at Villa Madarma, and at another one organized by AC Milan. On both occasions she was seated at the presidential table. According to Berlusconi and her parents, it's an old friendship; Gino and one of Noemi's aunts have denied it.
Whatever the case, by December Noemi was already at Villa Certosa with her friend Roberta, one the three friends with whom she recorded a video now doing the rounds on Youtube where they declare themselves to be fantastic and out of reach. Although, if we think about it, it might have been before, because Noemi herself declared, when she started being well known, that she had seen Papi often, that he was so busy that he couldn't always make it to Naples, and that they sang Apicella's songs together. Now she says in an interview in Chi magazine - owned, of course, by Berlusconi - in a final and desperate attempt to save face, that she is still a virgin.
Another way to enter Villa Certosa, to reach the status of butterfly and become part of the great entomologist's collection, is to know the sultan's friends. It's better if they are VIP business men who belong to the strictly judicial circle (the judiciary really brings people together), such as Marcello dell'Utri, who was convicted to nine years for mobster complicity; The boss of the Renault F1 team and off shore antics companion Flavio Briatore (who recommended the British lawyer David Mills, corrupt co-creator of the Fininvest B empire, to Berlusconi), or the complacent Fede Confalonieri, president of Mediaset.
It can also come in handy to know those brilliant and elderly reporters, shining stars in the world of official television, people like Fede (creator of the most surrealistic news show in the continent), or the always complacent Bruno Vespa, capable of interviewing the master 12 times a year and always avoiding the uncomfortable question.
They all represent the essence of Berlusconism-Velinism, and have therefore been visiting the Sardinian house for years. They seek security, companionship, warmth, peace, relaxation and beautiful bodies to mitigate the stressful and overwhelming business of politics, corruption and the always tiresome (for their back that is) antechamber journalism.
There are, of course, intermediate ways, various suppliers, fans of gineceo sports, pandering mothers willing to renovate for free the magician's box of tricks, ministers, vice-ministers and deputy secretaries willing to bring something new to the evenings, that enormous circle formed by the daughters of friends, acquaintances, vassals, employees, the cousin with promising curves of the doorman, the bodyguard or the cook, the carabiniero's niece, the aspiring model who e-mails her photographs to the Palazzo Chigi with her cell phone number written in a font imitating lipstick.