In 2008, during his fourth campaign to become Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi released a video in which a beautiful blond woman, standing in a grocery store beside a pile of bananas, sings, “There’s a big dream that lives in all of us.” A throng of women belt out the chorus together under a cloudless sky: “Meno male che Silvio c’è”— “Thank God there’s Silvio.” Other women in various settings pick up the tune: a young mother in a pediatrician’s office, surrounded by nurses; a brunette in a beauty parlor, dressed for work in a camisole that barely covers her breasts. To American eyes, the ad looks like a parody, or perhaps some new kind of musical pornography that’s about to erupt into carnality. The finale depicts a passionate young swimming instructor singing to a pool full of women in bathing suits: “Say it with the strength possessed only by those who have a pure mind: Presidente, we are with you!”

These days, you would have to possess an unusually pure mind to look at that pool full of young women without picturing the pool at Berlusconi’s estate, Arcore, just outside Milan. Along with the basement disco and the upstairs bedrooms, the pool is featured almost daily in Italian newspapers as one of the sites where the Presidente reportedly hosted scores of orgies—or, as they have become known around the world, Bunga Bungas. (There is heated debate about the origin of the term. Some say Berlusconi picked it up from Muammar Qaddafi—his friend, until recently. Others cite an off-color joke set in Africa.) The Bunga Bungas are a source of humiliation for many Italians, and of humor for others, including the Presidente, as Berlusconi is called. Not long ago, he told a convention of the Movement for National Responsibility, upon hearing its theme song, “My compliments on your anthem. I will use it as one of my songs for a Bunga Bunga!”

Berlusconi has always seemed pleased with himself. In 2006, he offered some advice to Italians living below the poverty line: “Do it my way and earn more money!” (His net worth is estimated at nine billion dollars.) He has described himself as “the best in the world—all the other world leaders wish they could be as good as I am.” Lately, however, his bravado has sounded increasingly misplaced. The Italian economy is stalled, and unemployment is at 8.4 per cent. In 2009, he was lambasted for his inadequate response to earthquakes in Abruzzo, which killed more than three hundred people and left seventy thousand homeless. Last July, Gianfranco Fini, the president of the parliamentary Chamber of Deputies, who had been a crucial ally for sixteen years, broke away to form his own party. And then came Ruby.

This past fall, it was reported that the Prime Minister was under investigation for paying for sex with a teen-age belly dancer named Karima el Mahroug—better known by her stage name, Ruby Rubacuori, or Ruby Heartstealer—and that he had intervened on her behalf when she was arrested for stealing money from a roommate. Berlusconi claims that he never had sex with her and that, anyway, she told him she was twenty-four. He admits that he gave her thousands of euros at the end of her first evening at Arcore, and tens of thousands more later, but insists that these were innocent acts of generosity. He instructed the police to release her from custody, he says, because he thought that she was a niece of the former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and he wanted to avoid straining diplomatic relations. (Mahroug, who was born in Morocco and grew up in Sicily, is not related to Mubarak.) After the story broke, other women came forward to tell the stories of their Arcore nights. A twenty-seven-year-old prostitute named Nadia Macrì described Berlusconi lying in his bed, being serviced by women in rapid succession. “He would say, ‘Next one, please,’ and sometimes we were all together in the swimming pool, where sex took place.” Berlusconi denies Macrì’s account, and her credibility has been called into question. Macrì is the star of a new adult film called “Bunga Bunga 3D.”

Rubygate, as everyone calls the scandal, has grown progressively more lurid. Two of Berlusconi’s friends, Emilio Fede—the host of the television show “TG4,” which airs on one of the three networks Berlusconi owns—and the entertainment agent Dario (Lele) Mora, are charged with running a prostitution ring to meet the Prime Minister’s elaborate erotic expectations, with help from Nicole Minetti, a twenty-six-year-old former dental hygienist, showgirl, and, possibly, lover of Berlusconi’s. (All three have pleaded not guilty.) For months, the prosecutor’s office in Milan had been wiretapping phones used by Berlusconi and his associates, and the twenty thousand pages of documents pertaining to Rubygate have been leaking out in Italian newspapers. The picture that has emerged is of an aging emperor, surrounded by a harem of nubile women paid to ornament his dinner table, boost his ego, and dance around in their underpants. Berlusconi is Italy’s waning Hugh Hefner, alternately reviled and admired for his loyalty to his own appetites—except that he’s supposed to be running the country.

On the morning of April 6th, the opening day of Berlusconi’s trial for soliciting prostitution with a minor and for misuse of power, dozens of women gathered in front of the courthouse in Milan. They were not thanking God for Silvio’s existence. Several carried bouquets in the colors of the Italian flag and held up a large sign that read “Magistrates, don’t give in! We are with you!” Antonietta Bergamo, a housewife in her sixties, wore a hand-lettered placard that read “Dictators, prostitutes, drugs, tax evasion, Mafia, sex abuse—our Berlusconi doesn’t go without!” There were men among the protesters, too; one held up a sign with a picture of Hello Kitty, an emblem of Berlusconi’s underage paramours, above the words “I am a minor . . . Presidente Berlusconi, I am not your prop!”

Berlusconi has fended off twenty-four lawsuits since he first took office, in 1994, and he did not come to the hearing that day. Neither did Karima el Mahroug, who has refused to serve as plaintiff in the case. (“She hasn’t suffered financial damage from visiting Arcore,” her lawyer, Paola Boccardi, told me. “But she’s had damage to her image from the media. Fifty-year-old men stop her on the street and say, ‘Let’s have Bunga Bunga together.’ ”) In Ruby’s place was Valeria Ajovalasit, the president of an Italian women’s organization called Arcidonna. She had come with her lawyers to file suit “on behalf of all women,” whose dignity, she said, had been damaged by the Prime Minister’s behavior.

On both sides of the courtroom were cages, used to contain defendants in Mafia trials. On the front wall was a mosaic depicting Truth, Justice, and Law as women. As it happened, Berlusconi’s adjudicators that day were all women, too: the three judges and the chief prosecutor, Ilda Boccassini, a redhead who wore red earrings, red cat-eye glasses, and a giant red bracelet, along with her black robe. It took the judges only seven minutes to adjourn the trial until May 31st, to allow time to review the legitimacy of Arcidonna’s motion to serve as plaintiff.

“Ilda the Red,” as Boccassini is often called in the press (for her supposedly leftward leanings as well as for her coiffure), has argued against Berlusconi in many trials, and that morning Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by Berlusconi’s brother, Paolo, had run an extremely unflattering photograph of her on the front page. There was a huge blowup of it in a white tent across the street from the courthouse, where a crowd of Berlusconi’s followers were conducting their own protest, against the women of the court, whom they accused of harboring political grudges. “For seventeen years, Berlusconi has been attacked by the magistrates—this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Marco Bestetti, a twenty-three-year-old law student, said. He’d come with several other young supporters of the People of Freedom (P.D.L.), Berlusconi’s political party. “Boccassini has a personal hatred for him,” Bestetti concluded. A mechanic named Massimo had a different explanation for the gathering. “We’re here because they’re giving us lasagna and cake,” he said, but added that he was opposed to activist judges: “The Presidente’snot necessarily a sane man, but we have to discuss matters democratically.”

Photograph by STEFANO DE LUIGI / VII NETWORK

Other Berlusconi enthusiasts in the tent were there not to protect democracy but to defend their vision of the male prerogative. An affable seventy-six-year-old named Michele Lecce, crisply dressed in a light-blue sweater under a navy blazer, explained, “If a woman comes with no clothes on, with her tits showing, you can’t say he has committed violence.” Lecce, a retired union leader, said he considers Berlusconi “a brilliant man,” adding, wistfully, “If only I had the money he has, I’d be on the top surrounded by beautiful girls. Maybe I’d drop, but it’d be a beautiful way to go!” He smiled sweetly and yelled across the street at the demonstrators, “You guys are all gay! We have the men who fuck!” Then he turned to me and said, “I see you are a girl—I want to kiss you!” He pinched my cheek and concluded happily, “This is nature.”

The sense that Berlusconi is just a natural man, one who happens to be exceptionally good at being male, has been an enormous part of his success. Throughout his career—as a singer on cruise ships, as a real-estate developer, as a media magnate, and, finally, as a politician—he has convinced Italians that he is someone they can both relate to and aspire to be like. Many men still feel that he is being attacked for being irresistible to women (which they would like to be) and plainly human, susceptible to sin (just like them). “He’s on the same wavelength as people,” one of Berlusconi’s friends told me. “He laughs when they laugh.”

Berlusconi has been far from contrite. A week before the opening of the Rubygate trial, he travelled to Lampedusa, a tiny island off the coast of Sicily where tens of thousands of North African refugees have come ashore in the past few months. He told the crowd assembled there, “Did you hear the latest poll? They asked women between twenty and thirty years old if they want to make love to Berlusconi. Thirty-three per cent said yes! Sixty-seven per cent said ‘Again?’ ”

The more pertinent number concerning Berlusconi and women is his approval rating among female Italians, which has fallen to twenty-seven per cent—down from forty-eight per cent just a year ago. “But they pardon,” Fedele Confalonieri, an old friend of the Prime Minister’s and the chairman of Mediaset, one of his companies, said on a recent morning, in his elegant office in Milan. “They forgive him about that, because, how can we say? He’s natural.” Confalonieri is a bald man with rheumy blue eyes, a dignified manner, and a penchant for quoting Shakespeare and opera. (He was until 2005 the president of the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala.)

Confalonieri asserted that Berlusconi has the utmost respect for women, and that he has been tremendously popular with them ever since the two men became friends, as sixteen-year-olds, in Milan. They were in a band together, and at one point Confalonieri kicked Berlusconi out, “because of women,” he said, meaning that Berlusconi always got the girls. “He was very handsome. Now he’s a little—how can you say?—dilapidated. Like a building.” Confalonieri laughed. “He was a very good sort of crooner: Frank Sinatra, Pat Boone, this kind, and also French songs, Yves Montand. He liked to go and dance with the girls.” Confalonieri was with Berlusconi when, in 1980, he met Veronica Lario, who became his second wife. (At the time, he was still married to Carla Dall’Oglio, with whom he had two children.) Confalonieri remembers it as “a very beautiful story.” Lario, an actress, was performing in a play at a theatre that Berlusconi owned. “She played ‘Le Cocu Magnifique,’ by a Belgian writer. I remember there was a scene where she—” Confalonieri mimed opening his shirt. “And she had very beautiful ones,” he told me, matter-of-factly. “Very beautiful tits. And he fell in love.”

Berlusconi has always believed that “politics is like courting women: you have to confuse the girls.” This technique—coercive charm, seduction through sleight of hand—is one of his hallmarks. In Lampedusa, he told the locals that he would clear out the immigrants within sixty hours, which he didn’t, and that he had bought a house there, which he hadn’t. “Now I am one of you!” he said, and the crowd cheered. This kind of casual dishonesty is what Giuliano Ferrara, Berlusconi’s friend and a former cabinet member, was referring to when he told me, “His lies are like the lies of a baby: he gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar and says ‘I’ve never eaten a cookie in my life!’ ” Until recently, many Italians forgave Berlusconi’s loose relationship with the truth. In a country that has long been burdened by an almost perverse bureaucracy, there is little contempt for the Artful Dodger; Italians evade paying taxes on a quarter of the economy.

Perhaps the most famous example of Berlusconian rule-bending—and the one with the most popular results—was his takeover of Italian TV. Television was introduced to Italy, in 1954, through a single channel, RAI, administered by the ruling Christian Democratic Party; the highlight of its programming was the Pope’s Sunday-morning Mass, which is still on the air. For decades, the government controlled television: in the seventies, political parties were allotted news coverage in exact proportion to their votes in parliament. Then, in 1976, the Italian Supreme Court ruled that private broadcasting could be allowed on a local level. Berlusconi, who had made a fortune building suburban housing developments, began buying up local stations and broadcasting the same content on all of them. In order to comply with the letter of the court’s ruling, he staggered the broadcasts by a few seconds on each network.

Technically, these were local broadcasts; effectively, as Berlusconi made clear to advertisers, he had a national market, which he glutted with American programs like “Dallas,” “Dynasty,” and “Falcon Crest”—stories of sex and money that promoted values at odds with those of the ruling political class, both the rigidly Catholic Christian Democrats and the anti-materialist Communists. On RAI, the state-controlled network, “you couldn’t advertise pet food, because it was somehow considered immoral in a world where children were starving,” Giulio Malgara, an Italian advertising mogul, told the journalist Alexander Stille for his book “The Sack of Rome.” “Italy had a culture of austerity,” he said. “ ‘Rich’ was a dirty word; they didn’t want to create incentives for consumption.” Berlusconi, however, believed that appetites existed to be stoked and sated, and he imported both American entertainment and the advertising environment that supported it. “I’m in favor of everything American before even knowing what it is,” he once told the Times.