Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi has died, aged 86. Photo / Getty
Silvio Berlusconi was many things: media baron, prime minister, football club owner and a man of irrepressible energy who became entangled in dozens of corruption and tax fraud trials.
However, as news of his death at the age of 86 came in, there was one thing for which he will be remembered best by the average person in the street: the notorious bunga bunga sex parties that he hosted at his homes around Italy, from an elegant palazzo in Rome to a mansion in Milan and a sprawling seaside villa in Sardinia.
The phrase originated from a vulgar joke that Berlusconi gleefully used to recount that featured opposition left-wing politicians being captured by a fictitious tribe in Africa and subjected to unspeakable acts.
But it came to define the bacchanalian soirées that he invited young models, actresses and escort girls to attend after the breakdown of his marriage to his second wife, Veronica Lario.
Details about the parties began to be leaked by the Italian press in 2009, when Berlusconi was well into his fourth – and what turned out to be his final – term in office.
Some of the revelations beggared belief. Here was a sitting prime minister, the leader of a G7 nation and one of the biggest economies in the EU, being accused of recruiting beautiful young women to entertain him and his friends.
There were lurid details of the girls dressing up in police uniforms, performing stripteases and dancing around a statuette of Priapus, the ancient god of fertility, invariably portrayed in Greek and Roman images as having an enormous, semi-erect phallus.
They would kiss Berlusconi and touch his “intimate parts”, two of the women later said. Berlusconi told crude jokes and sang songs in French and Italian.
It was irresistible tabloid fodder – Dick Emery meets La Dolce Vita, a Mediterranean version of the Benny Hill show, featuring a lascivious old man chasing nubile young starlets.
The women involved included at least one pair of twins, who happily posed for Italy’s voracious weekly gossip magazines, and a half-British former dental hygienist, Nicole Minetti, who later went into local politics, apparently with Berlusconi’s patronage.
For the rest of the world, it confirmed prejudices about Italy being a land of bottom-pinching lotharios with a twinkle in their eye.
But there was a darker side. Many Italians were appalled at the casual sexism and the objectification of women.
Some of the women invited to the bunga bunga parties said they were profoundly shocked by what they witnessed and complained that their names had been tarnished and their career prospects ruined.
Two 18-year-old beauty queens who asked to leave one of the gatherings were reportedly told by one of Mr Berlusconi’s associates: “If you want to go, fine, but you can forget about entering Miss Italy or becoming TV weather girls.”
As the reports turned from a trickle to a flood which dominated the Italian press for months, Il Cavaliere or The Knight as Berlusconi was dubbed by Italians after a state honour he was awarded, tried to brazen it out.
When he was accused of a dalliance with a Moroccan-born exotic dancer in 2010, he phoned police headquarters in Milan and told officers that the young woman, who had been arrested for suspected theft, must be released because she was the granddaughter of Hosni Mubarak, then leader of Egypt. Holding her would spark an international incident, he insisted.
The police were having none of it and nor were the courts. A Milan magistrate who dealt with the case told police: “If she’s the granddaughter of President Mubarak then I’m Queen Nefertiti.”
His involvement with the exotic dancer, who went by the stage name Ruby the Heart Stealer but whose real name was Karima El Mahroug, led to a sensational trial.
Prosecutors maintained that she was an underage prostitute and that Berlusconi had broken the law by paying for sex with her.
He was initially found guilty but on appeal was acquitted on the basis that he did not know that she was under 18, the legal age at which women in Italy are allowed to sell themselves for sex.
But there was more. Allegations of sexual impropriety had first surfaced a year before when a self-confessed escort, Patrizia D’Addario, recounted how she had sex with the prime minister on a big bed that he had been given, bizarrely by his old chum Vladimir Putin.
She then wrote a book about it, describing in toe-curling detail the whole experience.
The book was called “Prime minister, take your pleasure”, a reference to a famous scene in a Federico Fellini film, Amarcord, in which a prostitute climbs into bed and invites an Italian aristocrat to have his way with her.
She had been invited to a party at Berlusconi’s palatial residence, Palazzo Grazioli, which lies a few hundred yards from the Colosseum in Rome. There were around 20 glamorous young women competing for his attention.
“I was watching the whole thing with curiosity and my first thought was that I’d found myself in a harem,” D’Addario wrote. “Having been an escort I thought I’d seen a fair few things, but this I’d never seen, 20 women for one man.
“Normally in an orgy you have roughly the same number of men and women. But here…there was just one man with the right to copulate and that was the prime minister.”
In an interview with the Telegraph in her hometown of Bari, in the southern region of Puglia, she said: “All I can say is that he was a likeable person. And we didn’t get any sleep that night.”
The outlandish stories just kept on coming. It was revealed that there were parties with topless models at Berlusconi’s summer retreat on Sardinia’s exclusive Costa Smeralda, where he had previously entertained Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin.
The residence, it later emerged, featured a James Bond-style underground cave complete with an emergency escape exit to the sea.
It sounded unlikely but a photographer named Antonello Zappadu had the photos to prove it.
Berlusconi was forced to resign in 2011 but it was not the bunga bunga shenanigans that brought him down. It was more his mishandling of the Italian economy during the European debt crisis.
The trials relating to the bunga bunga scandal dragged on, in typical Italian fashion, for more than a decade.
As well as being accused of paying for sex with a minor, Berlusconi was charged with bribing many of the bunga bunga women in return for them giving false testimony at his original trial.
He denied all the charges and in February 2023 was finally acquitted.
His lawyers said that the gifts and money he had showered on them were compensation for the reputational damage that the starlets had suffered.
They argued that Berlusconi was no “satrap”, using the term for a powerful governor in the ancient Persian empire.
He had simply given money to the women “like a doting uncle would give pocket money to his nieces”, prosecutors said.
It was a defence which ultimately convinced the court. As with so many criminal charges he faced, Berlusconi managed to get off scot-free.
But it is the words of the prosecution that are likely to be remembered as the world considers the life and times of Il Cavaliere, a man who started out working as a singer on a cruise ship but became one of the most recognisable politicians on the planet, celebrated in Italian feature films and in a London musical.
Berlusconi had behaved like “a sultan”, said prosecutor Tiziana Siciliano in her closing arguments.
Following his divorce, he had sought to “liven up his evenings” with “a group of concubines, in the sense of sex slaves, who entertained him for a fee”.
With his hair implants, plastic surgery, political longevity and perpetual optimism, the sultan seemed immortal.
He may have been a deeply polarising figure for Italians but his presence on television, in the gossip magazines and in parliament seemed almost eternal.
But not even Silvio Berlusconi, the Teflon don who survived trials, sex scandals and the scorn of wronged women, could escape death in the end.
It marked the first such deal with a country that the US has a trade deficit with.