Rome Stories

Peter Popham hears a whisper of dissent from the beautiful, isolated Mrs Berlusconi, and reports on her husband's scheme to make Italy fly his party's colours

Her life, her emotions, her sorrows and joys are Italy's great imponderable. Veronica Lario, the blonde bombshell who became the second Mrs Silvio Berlusconi, had a brief career in the movies before succumbing to the charms of Italy's wealthiest man and vanishing behind the gates of his splendid country house, Villa Arcora.

Within those walls she has kept as silent as the Sphinx. "I won't be the Hillary [Clinton] of Arcora," she told Corriere della Sera in 1994, the year her husband became Prime Minister for the first time. She would remain as far outside the political scene as she could.

She has been as good as her word, perhaps better. "I don't want to become the stereotypical, insignificant wife," she has said, "always deferring to the husband's or the political leader's decisions, whatever they might be." She certainly hasn't done that: no blazing smiles from the podium, no waves to the party faithful, no tender clasping of the Prime Minister's elbow.

In the absence of hard intelligence, people who dislike Mr Berlusconi imagine Veronica moping through the gardens of her gigantic home, glancing at the children's homework, practising her arpeggios, occasionally perhaps dropping her golden hair out of the window in case some prince happens by. They fancy terrible rows, fatal estrangements.

Last month Ms Lario gave a rare interview to a magazine called Micromega, and in her careful distancing from her husband's support for war on Iraq it offered some grist to the anti-Berlusconi mill. "I believe the pacifist movement serves to re-awaken our consciences," she said. "They deserve respect ... Each one of us alone, in our room, in our home, even with brilliant ideas in our heads – without the capacity to communicate them, that would be the petrification of the conscience ..." That cri de coeur was followed last week, more obliquely but no less woundingly for the Prime Minister, by another.

Friday was Italy's Liberation Day, when the nation celebrates the return of democracy after the Second World War. But since the arrival in government, in coalition with Mr Berlusconi, of Mussolini's heirs, the "post-Fascists" – one member of the cabinet fought on Mussolini's side against the Allies – revisionism has been rife. This is not a national celebration, the rightists say, but a celebration of the victory of the leftist Partisans.

Mr Berlusconi feels the same way: invited to visit Marzabetto, the village where the Nazis slaughtered nearly 1,000 Italians in 1944, he chose instead to take his children to Nice.

And Veronica? Her paternal grandfather was shot dead by the Nazis in a village close to Marzabetto. The president of the committee for honouring the fallen at Marzabetto told La Repubblica last week: "The signora wrote me a very beautiful letter on the subject." Sitting in her room, in that house, nursing her own thoughts.

Mr Berlusconi celebrated Liberation Day by redesigning the Italian flag.

It was a subtly made-over tricolour that was run up the flagpole of Palazzo Chigi, his official residence, last week: the green a little deeper, the red closer to Bordeaux, the white now ivory. But in this design-conscious land, the opposition went ballistic. "It's a chromatic coup d'état!" raged the leader of the Greens. They fired off a query to Brussels: wasn't EU permission required for such a revolution? "No," came the unusually crisp, quick reply.

It only remains for someone to observe that the new flag – soon to be seen above 32,000 schools and 8,000 town halls – has exactly the same shades as the banner of Mr Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia.