Battered Berlusconi vows to make early comeback

John Follain

Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has insisted he will return to the public stage on Christmas Eve despite his family’s pleas to take a break from politics after he was attacked at a rally last week.

Doctors and aides urged Berlusconi, 73, to rest for three weeks after he suffered a broken nose and two broken teeth when Massimo Tartaglia, 42, an electronics engineer with mental problems, threw a spiked marble and metal replica of Milan Cathedral at him.

On Friday, his first day out of hospital, Berlusconi received 17 visitors at his mansion near Milan. His nose was bandaged and he had difficulty speaking.

Nevertheless, he was said to have told party members that he would spend Christmas Eve at the village of Onna in L’Aquila in central Italy, which was devastated by an earthquake in April.

He was equally determined in rebuffing his daughter Marina, 43, head of the Fininvest media holding company, when she urged him to think more about himself and his family and less about politics. A well-informed source said Marina, Berlusconi’s daughter by his first marriage, had “begged” him to take it easy.

A note of scepticism was sounded within hours of his departure from hospital, however. A film seen by 300,000 people on YouTube suggested the attack had been contrived. It used news footage to question why Berlusconi’s blood seemed to have “coagulated magically” and whether one of his bodyguards had held “an aerosol to spray fake blood”.

Daniele Capezzone, a spokesman for Berlusconi’s party, dismissed the theory as “microterrorism” and called his critics “cowards, falsifiers and dreamers”.

Berlusconi, who over the past year has faced two corruption trials, scandals over his relationships with showgirls and escorts and his wife Veronica Lario’s announcement that she was divorcing him, has portrayed himself as the victim of a campaign of hatred by his political foes. A statement from Berlusconi’s office described him as “the world leader who has suffered by far the greatest number of violent and partisan attacks in history”.

THE TIMES