RUBY THE HEART STEALER

THIS WEEK’S SUNDAY TELEGRAPH carries an interesting article by Nick Squires about Italy and about what being Italian means. On the eve of Italy celebrating its 150th anniversary as a nation, the tenet of this piece is that Italy is still a mish-mash of races who speak different, mutually unintelligible dialects or languages and lacks anything which might bring these peoples together other than football and war.

MR SQUIRES MAY BE OPTIMISTIC in including war as a unifying factor, as Italy changed sides in both world wars, and the only common feeling was a shared desire to run away from the guns being pointed at them or to pay those holding the weapons not to shoot at them.

BUT THIS CULTURAL MOSAIC IS ONE OF THE elements that makes Italy such a pleasant place to visit, and the vast differences in behaviour, customs and language one encounters provides one with a welcome challenge in these days of standardisation. Of all the European countries I have visited, none has the charm of the incomprehensible practices one finds as a tourist in, say, Milan, where I was finding it difficult to work out whom I should pay on the bus and I was helpfully informed by a local that bus tickets were sold in bunches in tobacconists or, on Sundays and in the evenings, in pharmacies, or – he added with a snigger – you just don’t pay.

THUS IN THE MIDST OF THIS ANARCHIC CHAOS one should be grateful as an Italian for anything that smacks of being vera italianità, anything that is stable, predictable and reliable and worthy of the risorgimento. Particularly anything that can live up to the international stereotype of the bottom-pinching, slightly underhand and shifty, foppish, smarmy and occasionally irascible Italian male. And thus we find an explanation as to why so many Italians would not swap Mr Berlusconi for all the ice cream in Naples.

FINALLY ABOUT TO FACE THE COURTS, Berlusconi still sees no imbroglio in being accused of sex with an underage girl called Karima El Mahroug, along with other charges of perverting the course of justice in her favour. Adding to the bizarre situation, Karima herself, pictured above at the opera and who has become known as Ruby 'the heart stealer', has appeared in an advert promoting a book by former MEP Alfonso Luigi Marra called 'The Female Labyrinth'. In the advert she is stripped by a man dressed as The Phantom of the Opera, and goes on to describe the book as a "guide to love, unemployment, the economy, etiquette and reform of the EU.” If anyone reads the book and discovers the connection between these things and/or their relationship to the book’s title, please let me know.

IT IS CLEARLY DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE the news that comes out of Italy, and I wonder where else a prosecuting lawyer would accuse a 75 year-old man of having sex with a 17 year-old girl; or one where the man would deny it; after having admitted it, saying he thought she was 18. On Wednesday last Berlusconi, after hearing the full charges against him, including his having sex with thirty-three prostitutes last summer, laughed and said, "I'm 75, and even if I'm a bit mischievous, 33 girls in two months is too much even for someone who is 30."

INDEED IT IS. BUT ONE MUST ADMIRE his panache. And like a large number of my fellow men, I would like to think that when I am 75 I will be in a position to be accused by someone who suspected me of having had sex with a 17 year-old girl. Most men of that age can’t even remember where they were last summer. So I am already practising clever lines to use in my defence if and when I am accused of something similar in twenty-five years time. My favourite one up to now is, “A 17 year-old you say? What day was this?”