The Italian Wife: a breath-taking and heartbreaking pre-WWII romance set in Italy

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When a 17-year-old Moroccan nightclub dancer known as Ruby the Heartstealer, who had been arrested for a petty crime, told police she knew Berlusconi, the claim set in motion a chain of events that would bring about the mogul’s downfall. My experience of true love has been magnified by cultural difference but there’s a universal lesson (Picture: James Appleton) Friends creator reveals Matthew Perry was ‘happy and chipper’ in final conversation before tragic death at 54 Berlusconi and German chancellor Angela Merkel shake hands during the 2008 Italy-Germany summit in Trieste A modest plan to make his homes more attractive by offering a local cable TV service, Telemilano, which showed light entertainment and reruns of American soap operas such as Dallas, grew into a network of local channels until, by the end of the 1980s, his trash TV empire of game shows and barely clothed hostesses came to dominate the Italian airwaves.

Italian Silvio Berlusconi obituary: Scandal-ridden Italian

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, left, greets Berlusconi during a meeting in Sirte on 10 February 2004 But, ultimately, it was not the “bunga bunga” parties that undid him, but his inability to cope as Italy’s debt reached unsustainable levels in 2011, when he was forced to resign in favour of technocrats. For every Italian that hated him for his monopolistic control of the media and abuse of power, there was another who admired his business acumen and was amused by his lowbrow larks. As the writer Curzio Malaparte wrote, Berlusconi’s qualities and defects “are the qualities and defects of all Italians”. Berlusconi raises the Champions League trophy aloft alongside AC Milan players after they beat Liverpool 2-1 in the 2007 final However, the more time we spent together, the more obvious our different expectations of how to show love became.

Born in 1936 in Milan to a bank clerk father and housewife mother, he attended a Catholic college, where he began a complicated relationship with the Church, which supported him until the mounting allegations of sleaze “superseded the limits of decency” in the view of at least one weekly Catholic newspaper. My experience of true love has been magnified by cultural difference but there’s a universal lesson here.

Wife Shared With Buddy - Timekiller Wife Shared With Buddy - Timekiller

That said, I’d like to think I’ve adopted some of the Italian style in how I show love in our marriage. Maggie and I first met at university in London but it wasn’t until a chance encounter at Pisa airport a couple of years later – me travelling, her in her native land – that we got to see each other in a different context and went from classmates to something more. Maggie was far more outwardly affectionate. She would have no problem using terrifying words like ‘love’ and telling me, both in person and via text, how happy being together made her. Relationships are different, of course, but the same principles apply. Grand romantic gestures tend to be rare, and for me to look someone in the eye and tell them how I felt about them was always deeply uncomfortable. I used to simply hope my affection shone through with my actions rather than my words. Meanwhile, I became better able to communicate my emotions, understanding the moments when I needed to go beyond my comfort zone to make her feel loved. On our first anniversary as a couple, I brought out my best Italian to post a gushing statement about the impact she’d had on my life and how she’d made me a better person. It helped me to build my confidence.

The absence of unprompted loving declarations came across as an imbalance: if she could say and do these things, why couldn’t I? Surely that meant I loved her less? And when she took the time to express these concerns, I felt uncomfortably pressured to behave in a way that was alien to me. A one-time cruise-ship crooner, Berlusconi used his television networks and immense wealth to launch his long political career, during which he inspired both loyalty and loathing. I’d agreed to go with her to a childhood friend’s wedding and all I could feel was a wave of panic. How do they know who I am? Why does it sound like I’m already a fixture? Isn’t there some kind of process to this?