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Corriere della Sera > Italian life > 

Senate Stenographer Paid As Much As King of Spain

Senate Stenographer Paid As Much As King of Spain

Stenographer’s €290,000 salary. Salaries quadruple by end of service. Clerks receive up to €160,000

Can a senator earn half of what the Palazzo Madama barber takes home? Yes, according to some parliamentarians who say their monthly salary is only €5,000 and sidestep questions from voters furious that cuts have failed to materialise. But no, it’s not true. It’s the same old trick – point to the “allowance” net of expenses, attendance allowances and other additional benefits. Taken together, other items all but treble a parliamentarian’s take-home pay.

The story has been dragging on for weeks. On one side, first-term Italy of Values (IDV) deputy Francesco Barbato waved his pay packet on television to show that salary, attendance allowances and assistant’s allowances took his net monthly pay to more than €12,000. On the other side is exclusive focus on the basic allowance. The claim is that other items don’t count. Many deputies (230 against 400 who haven’t) have actually signed contracts with their assistants and a large number pass some of the money on to their party. Often, they do so under duress but the gesture is a legitimate, and even noble, one. Yet is it right to burden the taxpayer with this, in addition to election expenses and allowances given to parliamentary groups? Would relations with the public not be better served by showing an actual pay slip? In the wake of a series of cuts, today’s pay is genuinely lower than the €14,500 revealed by Communist Refoundation (PRC) parliamentarian Gennaro Migliore.

But a confrontation in which both sides focus solely on how much deputies and senators are paid doesn’t make a lot of sense. Worse, it could turn voters off politics and distract attention from the real issue. And that issue is the overall cost of Italy’s resource-devouring political merry-go-round – the 52 buildings occupied by the parliamentary powers-that-be, the cost of red tape and the cost of the political structures, regional authorities, provincial authorities, myriad intermediate bodies and mixed capital enterprises that serve to feed a self-referential system.

The pay packets handed out to Senate employees say it all. Senate staff’s professional excellence has always earned high praise from senators on right and left, whether they come from the south of Italy or the north, but pay levels have risen to heights unparalleled elsewhere. Parliamentarians may be willing to attack Monti, Berlusconi, Bersano or even the Pope but they never criticise the clerks who cosset them day by day. Some hint, however: “We’re not the only ones who are overpaid around here”. The Northern League serjeant-at-arms Paolo Franco says quite openly: “The contract for Palazzo Madama staff is jaw-dropping. It gives them unbelievable career progression. Clearly, no more contracts like these should be stipulated in future. Everything needs to be changed”. How can a system survive when a stenographer can earn more than the King of Spain? It sounds unlikely but that’s the way it is. Without the three-year solidarity cut imposed by Giulio Tremonti for salaries over €150,000, a stenographer in the top pay band rakes in nearly €290,000 gross. Only €2,000 less than Spain pays Juan Carlos de Borbón and €50,000 more than Giorgio Napolitano’s gross salary of €239,181 as president of Italy.

Naturally, no one is stealing anything. Like Ermanna Cossio, the youngest pensioner in the world who retired at the age of 29 on 94% of her final salary, the stenographers can say that they didn’t make the rules. Fair enough. But those rules enable Senate staff to quadruple their pay in real terms over their career, thanks to a ridiculous system of automatic increments. Today, the rules generate sky-high earnings at a time when the rest of the county is being asked to make big sacrifices. Gross of tax and the Tremonti cuts, a clerk or barber can pick up €160,000, an assistant €192,000, a secretary €256,000 and an adviser €417,000. And that’s not all because the salary can be padded out with allowances. A chief clerk in the Chamber of Deputies is entitled to a monthly supplement of €652 gross, which rises to €718 in the Senate. A head service adviser at Montecitorio receives a supplement of €2,101 while a colleague in the Senate gets €1,762, to say nothing of the top-flight jobs. According to l’Espresso magazine, junior minister for the Prime Minister’s Office with responsibility for relations with Parliament Antonio Malaschini earned €485,000 gross in 2007 as the Senate’s general secretary. Subsequently, he received a €60,000 hike that took his pay to an all-time record for the post. Obviously, pensions are in proportion, and according to the tables are never lower than €500,000 gross per annum.

This is one of the issues. Extremely favourable methods of calculation turn high salaries into equally spectacular pensions. We could mention that staff hired before 1998 can still take their pension at 53, albeit with relatively bearable penalties. Like an example? A 53-year-old parliamentary adviser hired at the age of 27, who purchased pension rights for four years spent at university, has accumulated 38 years of pensionable service. This means he or she can retire on €300,000 gross per annum, the equivalent of 85% of final salary. Should he or she stay on to the bitter end – age 60, in this context – then the pension becomes 90% of final salary, more than €370,000 of the maximum €417,000. Lower pay bands work in much the same way. At 53, a clerk can retire with a pension cheque worth €113,000 a year, which can rise to over €140,000 if he or she hangs on until the age of 60. The consequences are mind-boggling. A senator with maximum contributions will never be able to pocket such a healthy pension and all this is still going on as the Save Italy package racks up the retirement age for ordinary Italians while trimming pensions with the move to a pro-rata contribution scheme.

Yet it would be wrong to say that Parliament has done nothing. In December, the Senate’s presidency council decided that pro-rata contributions should apply for staff currently in service. But as Paolo Franco explains, before the ruling becomes operative, it will have to survive the administration’s negotiations with the unions, of which there are about ten in Palazzo Madama for fewer than 1,000 employees. The locking of horns will be relentless. Following months of arguing over costs, a 2008 clamp-down backed by serjeant-at-arms Gianni Neddu looked to be in place. But when the new majority took office, it opted to avoid a clash and union vetoes torpedoed the initiative. This time, negotiations are set to be even more entertaining. Lined up against the unions is the deputy president of the Senate, Rosy Mauro of the Northern League, a party that is strongly opposed to pension reform. Ms Mauro is herself a trade unionist and the serving president of SINPA, the Northern League’s union.

In the meantime, parliamentary staff who head for the door are being showered with gold. Parliamentary adviser Sig. X – as we will call him but he has a name and surname – left the Senate in July 2010 at the age of 58. Since then, until the three-year solidarity contribution for top pensions came into effect, Palazzo Madama was paying him a monthly pension of €25,500. Twenty-five thousand five hundred euros. Fifteen times a year. In proportion, the 13 payments ordinary mortals receive would be worth €29,423. This even outstrips the pension of former Senate employee and former parliamentarian Giuseppe Vegas, who today chairs the Stock Exchange watchdog CONSOB. His monthly pension is reckoned to be €20,000. Then there is Sig. Y, who was hired with only a junior school leaving diploma. After retiring in July 2010, again at 58, he can’t complain about his €9,300 a month, minus the Tremonti cuts. Fifteen times a year. In other words, he takes home better than €20,000 more than the maximum salary of Barack Obama’s 21 closest aides.

The figures spotlight the privileges lurking in a crazy system that should be corrected before – before! – anyone touches the pensions paid out by the social security institute INPS. The accounts of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies couldn’t be clearer. In 2010, the average pay of the Chamber’s 1,737 employees, from humble clerks to the general secretary, was €131,585, or 3.6 times the average pay of a civil servant (€36,135) and 3.4 times the pay (€38,952) of a counterpart in the UK’s House of Commons. We are talking about pay, not the cost of labour. If we factor in social security contributions, the average cost of each member of the Chamber’s staff shoots up to €163,307 while the 962 staff members in the Senate cost an average of €169,550. But there is more. The Senate’s accounts feature an item that refers to “non-employee staff”, which includes committee consultants and other collaborators but in particular workers contracted for various obscure “special secretariats”. Despite the much-trumpeted cuts, the cost of these contracts rose in 2011 from €13.52 million to €14.99 million. A hike of 10.87%, or three times the inflation rate, as Italy’s GDP headed south.

Sergio Rizzo and Gian Antonio Stella

4 gennaio 2012 | 16:36

© RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA

English translation by Giles Watson

Let me now ask you this simple question: how do you classify similar behaviours and earnings, moral or immoral? If, as I think, you classify them as immoral, then let me ask you something more: is it ethic or not to ask people to behave like French revolutionaries on July 14, 1789? Is ethic or not to ask people to not have any kind of fears and go onto the streets to ask for a new political, social and democratic order? Is it acceptable to ask people to do do something hard and strong to stop "a gang of vampires"?

If your answer is yes, then let me tell you something more: please, don't think this kind of foolishness is an exclusivity of Italian political system. If you think this you are wrong. Because this foolishness is like a virus that is expanding worldwide. All the so called "democratic" political systems in the Western World are infected of such corrupted bad people and their bad behaviours. In my opinion there is only a possible, acceptable and valid solution. The solution is to come back to behave like an old Japanese samurai. If you don't remember which kind of power owned an old samurai, please go to "PAGES" section at the bottom of this same Blog and read my previous post titled "The Honour of Samurai as learnt by Takashi Matsuoka" (you can click on the title if you prefer to go straight to the post). You will refresh your memory and your consciousness as well, especially morally and ethically.

Is "Ethic Individualism" the key opening the door to a valuable life in the Third Millennium?

Basically there are two social-economic systems still surviving in our age. One is Capitalism, which is apparently the winner. The other one, the loser, is Communism. But if we come back in human history just only 200 years ago neither Capitalism nor Communism were the leading system by which human beings were setting up their lives. 

Since we are just living the present and we are not able to behave thinking we are part of a temporal flux such as Past, Present and Future, we naturally tend to believe that our last discovers and inventions will last forever. Nothing could be more wrong. Our present capitalistic times are not forever. The seed of changes is already germinating. Along this unbelievable year 2011 we have assisted to a lot of social convulsions. It all started as we now know as "Arab Spring". Then the rage of Muslin people, even for other motivations and under different forms, emerged in Europe, especially with the so called movement of "15 March" in Spain. Now, in these first days of Fall, we are viewing how the protests are taking a new form of protagonist even in USA with the movement "Occupy Wall Street". 

Rightly people all over the world is just pissed off. Personally I consider myself a pisser (my American cousin baptised me in this way and I think he is right). I am part of that 99% people that is tired of the greed of 1% population. This 1% is destroying all that the 99% of the people has built over the last 200 years. So now don't be surprised if in a global economy, the struggle of the 99% is necessarily a global struggle.

However there is a question that is intriguing me in these days regarding all that is occurring all over the world. I would like to turn you this question, if you agree. The question is: how much ethic is the behaviour of the protesters and how much is an interested behaviour their behaviour? 

I believe we have to clear the field by a serious misunderstanding, if we want to really understand what is now happening and how the present will affect our next and far future. Sometimes to understand the present and the future could be useful to have a look to the past.

Forty-three years ago, it was 1968, started the so called "Revolution of May '68". It started in Paris and the motivation, if you look at the past with the eyes of today, sounds really ridiculous. The detonator that exploded the bomb just was a simple case of sexual discrimination. A male student was not allowed to visit his girlfriend in her college apartment. The prohibition was considered unacceptable by young Parisian students. They all went out on the streets protesting against what they considered a limitation of personal freedom. 

What nobody could forecast at that time was that this protesting behaviour was the stroke that broke the camel's back. Once the movement of students started his rebellion, it was like an immense river flowing to the sea. It grew suddenly up more and more, until the constituted Power had to admit that the protesters had overpassed their expectations. Since the Power was not prepared to this kind of rebellion it needed a lot of time to understand what to do. Finally the Power decide to use the only way it can admit to preserve its existence. The constituted Power used the force of the police to block any attempt of changing the legal order. Notwithstanding this Power's reaction it couldn't prevent that the "red terrorism season" especially in Germany and Italy could be born. The so called "70s" were considered in Europe by all conservative Governments the age of fighting a possible victory of the communist ideology.

Nowadays the Power is already alerted from that bad experience and is not wasting time. It is reacting promptly to any behaviour that can represent a danger even so far. Power is now well organized and it can't allow to miss his dominance. For this reason even if all the protests are basically pacific protests, Power is already using police against protesting people.

People is doing absolutely nothing. Sometime people is just pacifically showing their opposition to the social-economic system with a song. Have a look, for instance, to the following video and let me know if you don't agree with my opinion. This is the video, which is absolutely tender, I promise.

On the other side the last October 15 (already baptised Movement 15-O) we have assisted in Rome to an indecent show organized by Black Block movements and all his anarchist supporters. In Italy there is an historic anarchic movement that always fight using violence as a tool to claim even little social transformation. It is in the Italian DNA to be anarchist, probably because Italian people what they evaluate more is a vision of life based on individualism.


Personally and in principle I am not opposing to an individualist vision of society, always and when this vision doesn't affect the majority people's life. If you consider that the heart of Capitalism ideology is based on an individualistic philosophy, well, there is nothing wrong in it. Unless, as it is now happening, this individualism is elevated to a previous never seen grade of egoism (Wall Street speculators' behaviour, for example) or using the violence as a politic tool (anarchist in Rome or London, for instance) instead of discussing social controversy into the appropriate legal forms and institutions. 


However if we accept that individualism is the base of any modern society (intending for modern all the western world societies born after World War Two) we must assume there will be something by which justify the correctness of this idea of life. 


I don't know you but I tend to believe that a vision of life based on collectivism is definitely faded for the following three reason: the fallen of Berlin Wall, the slow but constant progressive change of Chinese society from a communist society to a capitalistic society and even the recent changes in the policy of Raul Castro in Cuba. The last bastion of a collective ideology remains North Korea but, early or later, even there something will happen and things will start to change. 


So what we should have to consider is how to mitigate the influence that individualism can have on people and the way they organize their social life. 


It is not really easy to find a way to stop the bad influence that an exaggerated and extreme vision of individualism can bring to our life. As said, Wall Street speculators (and all speculators all over the world) are the living example on how people without ethic and moral principles can create an economic disaster on a global scale. 


But this is the point I am talking about and I wish you to fix your attention on. I have just talked about "Ethic and Moral Principles" as a filter by which looking at the reality or, if you prefer, as a barrier that we should never exceed to avoid predictable catastrophes as already happened in the past.


Any time a punch of greedy people doesn't respect this limit of ethic and moral principles we have assisted to an impoverishment of the majority of the people and their social downgrading on a global scale. What is, for instance, the World War Two if not the result of 1929 crisis? So don't be too much surprised if suddenly can explode another global war. By fact this global war is already happening even if it is a kind of war that is not fought by opposite armies since it is fought by civilian people against state organizations like police and secret services.


At this point of the human history we should all ask the following question: are we doing the right thing ignoring the request of 99% of the people? I don't know your answer, but I know mine. My answer is: no, we are committing a big mistake because this 99% of the people is just asking to live a decent life. But since a punch of greedy people is not interested to share the wealth on Earth and it is only interested to become richer every day more, well, it would be only my opinion, but I believe that this 99% of the people on Earth is right.


We are living in a world with too much economic and social inequalities. We are living in a world where it is believed normal and acceptable that a person can earn in a year what could satisfy the necessities of 100,000 people for a life time. Is this kind of world we have build all together a fair and correct world? Is this a world where ethic and moral principles are still respected?

No, my dear readers, I don't think so. This is a world where ethic and moral principles have been forgotten since a lot of time. What is incredible it is I can't say you when we started to forget them, because in any time and in any country of the world always happens the same. There is a moment, difficult to establish, that a society of good people starts to be corrupted by power and money. All the biggest empires in the past have passed through this bad and destructive experience.This is now happening again at a global level. It seems that a corruption of moral and ethic principles is widely expanding all over the world, as if it was a virus. 


The only defence we have is to enforce our ethic and moral principles so we can strengthen our personal behaviours. Without this that I can, one more time, define a R-Evolution we can't pretend to win the battle to re-equilibrate the wealth of people. In other words we must finish to behave like sharks during an attack to provide their food. Yes, we are animals, it is useless to deny it. But we are a special category of animals. We are a category of animals possessing a deep consciousness. I don't know you but I hear this consciousness shouting out loud. It is asking us to revise our vision of individualism and mitigate it with ethic and moral principles like compassion, charity, a moderate life, sharing part of our wealth if our wealth is so big that 1,000 people can live daily with the money we earn in a month. 


I am not stimulating a renaissance of communism. For God's sake, I hate communism. Nothing is worst than communism for me. But yes, I am promoting the idea that "Ethic Individualism" is the key opening the door to a valuable life in the Third Millenium. Are you ready for it? 

The bad influence of Silvio Berlusconi on Italian people.

Do you remember when on The Economist magazine appeared a report whose title was "Why Silvio Berlusconi is unfit to lead Italy"? It was on April 26th, 2001. More then 10 years ago.

Well, I am not going to repeat what we already know because most of us, probably, have been reading that report. What I am going to talking about is how the Italian Prime Minister has had a bad influence on Italian people, especially young people, during these last 22 years.

So I am not going to discuss if he is fit or not to lead Italy. What I want to inform you is about the influence of this man on Italian people and how much this influence has been negative along this last 22 years. Or maybe over last 30 years, since he assumed an important role in the Italian economy being the owner of the most important Italian private group of media..

Basically I will inform you about Silvio Berlusconi's behaviour as private person and not about his job as public administrator. Because I am convinced that behind the screen of his public profile there is a person with his convictions, fears, idiosyncrasy, weakness and beliefs. Once we know this almost secret part of his personality then we can trace and understand his public profile. In another way we are only supposing something that is uncertain.

Last but not least we must consider something that is absolutely basic in a kind of analysis like this. I am referring to the social environment that, in this case, it is the Italian society. Both are strictly connected so we can't understand Silvio Berlusconi if we don't understand the Italian society i.e. the social environment. What I am trying to say is this: imagine that the environment is water and Silvio Berlusconi is a fish. If the water is a river the kind of fish swimming in it is totally different from a fish whose water is the sea, right?

I think that you have perfectly understood this last example so it is time I start to tell the story. First of all Silvio Berlusconi was born in Milan. If he was born in Rome or Naples or Palermo probably he would be never turned up to the top of the Italian society and then at the top of the world. Because Milan, among all the Italian cities, it is the most suitable for a man whose ambition is to arrive to the top. Milan is the only town of Italy with an European vocation, the only town whose citizens are able to think globally and not only locally like all the other Italian towns. If you know Milan as me, you know Milan it is an international centre enough well connected with the heart of Europe. This means that people living in Milan are able "to think big". They are not a kind of typical Italian middle-class, Roman style, for instance. Because people living in Rome (and even if Rome is the capital of Italy) are very, very provincial people. They are not able to see more far than their nose. If for instance you start to criticize Rome and Romans and at the end of your critics they understand you are right, do you know what they say to cut off any discussions? They say: "E che ce' mporta, tanto a Roma c'avemo er Papa!". Which, translated, means: "We don't mind anything, because we have the pope in Rome!" By this a Roman citizen means that he felt protected by the presence of the Pope even when things are going wrong. What they are saying is they feel protected as they were under the wings of the same Lord!


But a citizen of Milan doesn't think in this way. A citizen of Milan basically is convinced that with his effort and application in his job he can reach any kind of goal in his life. This is more a protestant-Calvinistic attitude than a catholic attitude. So Silvio Berlusconi is a son of this social Milanese environment. If you understand this now you understand why Silvio Berlusconi is such a fighter, for instance.


On the other side what is wrong in Milan is the "Bauscia" attitude. Under the name "Bauscia" in Milan is identified a man who became rich but he never had the culture and the attitude to be rich. It means that there is a lot of vulgarity in this man and this vulgarity is not cancelled by the fact he reached a status of rich man. 


If you compare, for instance, Silvio Berlusconi with the already dead Gianni Agnelli, the former president of Juventus football team and Fiat company cars, you can understand how big is the difference in terms of attitude between them. Gianni Agnelli, probably due to he came from Turin, the first capital of former Italy kingdom,  incarnated an aristocratic style and for this reason sometime he was called the "King of Italy". Silvio Berlusconi on the contrary is considered the typical "Bauscia", a self-made man but with no style, just an imitation of it.


This "Bauscia" culture, paradoxically, match very well with another Italian local culture, the culture of the town of Naples, in the South of Italy. A Napolitan type is well represented in the "Commedia dell'Arte" character whose name is Pulcinella. Pulcinella basically is a liar, he is living always cheating people and his external fun is almost always fake because, inside, he is always sad.


Bauscia style and Pulcinella style perfectly match into Silvio Berlusconi personality. He is a mix of both. But doing so the result is that Silvio Berlusconi is living a kind of life is not a real life, since he is living the life of a comedian on a theatre stage. Silvio Berlusconi is confusing his real life with the role he is interpreting, like an actor on a theatre stage or in a movie set. In this sense Italy is full of this kind of persons. One of the most famous, lately, was Giuliano Soria, an important Italian cultural operator that has recently destroyed a famous literary Italian prize due to his inability to make a distinction between his personal life and his role as president of "Premio Grinzane Cavour".


If you understand this you can now understand why Silvio Berlusconi is involved in so many scandals. Financial scandals, corruption scandals, sex scandals, etc. His life is the result of a full distortion of the Italian concept of "furbizia". The closest translation of this Italian word could be "foxiness". It is the only English name that can give an idea of what Italian people mean when they say "è un uomo furbo". This means that they see a man smart like a fox. 


But Silvio Berlusconi has pushed the limit of foxiness over the moral and ethic limit. This is the problem. In his concept of foxiness there is something that doesn't reflect any more the original meaning of this word. Because in his original meaning all the Italian people assigned to the word foxiness (remember, furbizia in Italian) a sense of sharp and smart intelligence. If you empty the original meaning, as Silvio Berlusconi does, and you substitute it with a sense of cheating all people you meet on your way then, of course, all you get is to be involved in so many scandals. I think this is unavoidable. 


There is another matter we have to consider. I mean the typical Italian male obsession with sex. Since you are young, in Italy, you are not in competitions with your friends and mates to show you are the best in school or sport activities like in USA, for instance. No, all that minds to an Italian guy is to show how many girl he, sorry, fucked along his life. Italian males are really obsessed with this. It is something difficult to explain and understand where is coming from. I could do it, but I should involve in this explanation Italian women and I don't want, now, to enter another complex analysis. Take my words as good and trustful, at the moment. 


If you want that an Italian man feels proud with you don't ask him how much rich he is or which car is owning. Ask him how many women lied with him into his bed. You will see an incredible smile shining on his face. He will feel so proud to tell you about his sexual encounters. Trust me.


Is Silvio Berlusconi a son of this culture? Of course he is. He is fully absorbed into this culture since he was a young Italian boy. If you don't understand this you can't understand why Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, divorced by his first and second wife. Especially his second wife, the really beautiful former actress Veronica Lario.


When Silvio Berlusconi met Veronica Lario she was still working as actress. One day he saw her in Teatro Manzoni in Milan. In an interview of many years ago she told that Silvio Berlusconi to conquer her heart sent her giant bouquets of red roses to impress her. Every night she was acting she received that gift that she found in her dressing room. So finally she decided to meet him and he confessed her to be fully in love with her.


The beginning of this story is really nice, as any other love story in the world. Veronica Lario was really a beautiful woman, one of the most beautiful Italian women of that time. They finally married in 1990 and she told as her husband Silvio at the beginning of their relationship was really romantic. When they met at home in the evening  he asked her, both seated on their sofa, to caress and talk him about love. Probably this was the Silvio Berlusconi's way to forget all the problems and difficulties after an hard day of job.


On the other side this idyllic scene maybe hides some Edypic complex, I suppose, in a man already 54 years old in that moment. This need to be caressed and talked about love by a woman for long time in the evening denounces an internal fragility of Silvio Berlusconi. It seems that more than a woman he needed a mother reassuring him on his virility.


But do you remember what I told you some lines above regarding the Italian young males obsession with sex and women? So it seems that this obsession with women and sex in Silvio Berlusconi persisted even in his adult age. Worst, this obsession is still persisting in his older age till now he is 75 years old!!!


If you want to understand all the sex scandals like "bunga-bunga" and the more than 30 prostitutes involved in the allegations against him, you have to start since the beginning. The beginning is the Italian social environment where a young Italian boy must always show and demonstrate his virility to everybody. People around him (family members, friends, mates, etc. both males and females) will be always ready to applaud him any time he can show a new feminine conquest. So Italian males are victims of a system where sexuality is at the centre of their life. But not a correct sexuality in terms of quality, since only in terms of quantity. The psychological distortion is really evident. You don't need to be graduated in psychoanalysis or psychiatry to understand how wrong is this Italian vision about sex.


Well, now all we need to ask is: why all this badly influenced Italian people? 


In the early 40s, in Italy, there was a song whose lyrics (already translated) repeatedly said: "Teacher, please, can you tell me who was born first: the egg or the chicken?" This is the same situation. Who is guilty, the Italian society or Silvio Berlusconi? Who started first?


Of course, at a first sight, your answer will be: Italian society because it pre-existed to Silvio Berlusconi arrival on the Italian scene. Yes but not, it is my answer to this interpretation. Because even if it is true that Silvio Berlusconi arrived later, I can guarantee you that he exaggerated a lot what initially only was a funny way to look at sex in Italy. Of course we must consider that there is a part of Italy, Sicily for instance, whose vision of sexuality is more similar to a Muslin society than Northern European society. This is surely due to so much Arab invasions of Sicily, I suppose. In this region of Italy sex is still seen as a pity, something dirty, something to do hidden to the eyes of the community. But in general sex in Italy was more linked to the idea of fun and exhibition. If you think to all Fellini movies or the fabulous Sofia Loren's strip tease for Marcello Mastroianni in the Italian movie "Ieri, Oggi e Domani" (tr.: Yesterday,  Today and Tomorrow) you can easily understand what I mean. Even if we must never forget the role of the catholic Church in Italy. On sex question the Church point of view has been always an asphyxiation, as you surely know.


So Silvio Berlusconi, I am ready to guess, has been always in conflict inside himself about sex. Pity or fun, fun or pity? This conflict has been surely complicated from the general Italian vision to look at sex only in terms of quantity and not in terms of quality. 


Silvio Berlusconi, instead of overtaking this vision and try to live a life free of this kind of obsessions, has lived fully absorbed in this dilemma up to the point that at the age of 75 years old he still feels the necessity to continuously and publicly show his virility. Franking speaking, I don't know you, but I found enough ridiculous this behaviour. Who matters the sexual excitements of such an old man? 

Silvio Berlusconi, Italian Prime Minister

(picture courtesy of Platon photographer)

Don't you think he is smiling like an old satyr?

The only problem is he is not a Mr. Nobody but he is the Prime Minister of one of the most reputed countries in the Western World. But since he is filling such an important role I find his behaviour really unacceptable. Because his private sex life is under everybody's eyes, especially young generations eyes. These same young generations one day will be the adults. Since an adult is the product of what he/she was when he/she was young you now understand why I can sustain the thesis that Silvio Berlusconi is exercising a bad influence on Italian people, especially young people. 


To satisfy his desire to show to the whole world he is still full of sexual energy with the aim of receiving the Italian society applause, he has even sacrificed his family and his marriage with Veronica Lario. I really don't know if his five sons and daughters, in private, are proud to have a father like him whose sexual dirty life is analysed every day by the media all over the world. I feel a lot of compassion for them, really. I fell so sorry for Berlusconi's daughters and sons.


So now I have only one hope. My hope is that the Italian people can finally understand how big has been the mistake to have Silvio Berlusconi as Prime Minister of their Country. I hope the Italian people can understand they have been victims of the sexual obsessions of an old satyr. At the same time I hope Italians can understand that this old satyr is the product of a wrong Italian mentality about sex. So it is now time for them to turn the page and start a new capitol of the Italian story. Italian need a kind of Prime Minster with an ethic and moral vision of life, a man or woman whose dedication is to serve the nation leading the country towards a new ethic and moral heights. Italy and Italians deserves this, because this country has suffered too much in this last 22 years, since the Berlin Wall dropped down I mean.