Francesca Pascale asks for audience at the Vatican a day after Italy's senate votes to expel disgraced former prime minister

The 28-year-old girlfriend of Silvio Berlusconi has called on Pope Francis to grant her an audience so she can fight to clear the expelled senator's name.

In comments published the day after the upper house of the Italian parliament approved the historic expulsion of the three-times prime minister, who was convicted in August of tax fraud, Francesca Pascale said the move was "a coup d'état" that had caused her "unutterable bitterness".

"I am appealing to Pope Francis. An appeal for him to receive me and hear Berlusconi's story," she was quoted as saying in the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera.

At 76, the Argentinian pontiff is a year younger than Pascale's billionaire boyfriend.

Her declaration is not the first time the Vatican has surfaced as a perhaps unlikely source of salvation for a man who is, among other things, appealing against a conviction of paying for sex with an underage prostitute and then abusing his office to cover it up.

This week, rumours circled around Rome that Vladimir Putin would consider giving his old friend a Russian diplomatic passport as Moscow's ambassador to the Holy See. A spokesman for the Russian president dismissed the idea as "pure fantasy", according to the Ansa news agency.

Pascale, a former television showgirl from Naples, has made no secret of her desire to marry Berlusconi once his divorce from his wife, Veronica Lario, is finalised. Pascale's dog, a miniature poodle named Dudù, has become something of a character in his own right on Italy's increasingly bizarre political stage.

"I would like to take him [Berlusconi] away with me, distance my man from those who hate him, to keep him from the blows and unjust humiliation," she said after the senate vote. "But I know that that would not be him; he would not recognise himself in the mirror in the morning – and even I wouldn't recognise him."

In a defiant speech on Wednesday, the media magnate insisted that his removal from parliament would not preclude his continuation in politics as leader of his revived Forza Italia (FI) party, which is now in opposition to Enrico Letta's coalition government.

Draped in an FI flag, Pascale watched the speech from outside Berlusconi's Rome residence, Palazzo Grazioli, and was photographed appearing to kiss his hands as he got down from the platform.

She said she had been ready to go to Italy's head of state, Giorgio Napolitano, a former communist, and make a personal plea for a presidential pardon. But she said: "I realised that in reality those doors, for us, were closed."

In its verdict on 1 August, the supreme court ordered Berlusconi to serve a sentence of four years, commuted to one, of either community service or house arrest. The senate expulsion bars him from parliament for six years.