Italy: Narcissistic as a Roman emperor

Beppe Severgnini

Corriere della Sera

There is something uniquely Italian about the “narcissism” of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said Beppe Severgnini. As the sex scandals surrounding Berlusconi and his bevy of paid escorts—some of them underage—multiply, Italians have been eagerly asking, “How, where, how many?” But the one question we have not asked is why. Why would “such an important man, the leader of a government, surround himself with courtesans and bimbos?”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Perhaps the answer lies in our national character. Surely it’s not sex that the prime minister is after, at the ripe age of 74—it’s the favors of “Lady Approval and her three sisters, Admiration, Adulation, and Adoration.” Don’t we all have an element of “exhibitionism,” as shown in our national obsession with “cutting a fine figure”? Berlusconi has simply taken this trait to its extreme. A boundless need for approval drove this former showman, who once worked as a crooner on a cruise ship, to become a billionaire media magnate and finally leader of one of the world’s biggest economies. “All of which makes him blind to the grotesque spectacle” of an elderly man drooling over pretty girls.

Underneath it all, Berlusconi is a deeply “lonely man.” Italians can see that, and that’s why we don’t condemn him. We pity him.