Feminists back public attack over former premier�s flirting, while others are impressed 70-year-old can still make women jealous
From Philip Willan in Rome

SILVIO Berlusconi's midweek marital spat was a source of acute embarrassment for the playboy former prime minister. A demand for a public apology from his wife splashed across the front page of a hostile newspaper was enough to make him choke on his breakfast cornetto.

The left-leaning La Repubblica took the same delight in baiting the billionaire opposition leader as a bullfighter, aiming its deadly banderillas at the most vulnerable part of its adversary's anatomy.

His highly publicised conjugal dispute subsequently occupied pages and pages of newsprint, knocked other topics off the evening television chat shows and became one of the top news stories all around the world.

It posed a quandary, of course, for Berlusconi's own television news programmes, which coyly refused to discuss this "private matter" until their owner's letter of reply was ready.

The spectacle might have left a lesser man despondent, with analysts interpreting it as yet another symptom of this ageing politician's spiralling decline.

But not Berlusconi. The media magnate responded immediately with a treacly love letter that might have been penned by one of the scriptwriters who fill the afternoon hours of his three national television channels with tales of infidelities and surprising reconciliations.

Silvio Sircana, prime minister Romano Prodi's spokesman - so not a Berlusconi fan - gave him a generous 10 out of 10 for communication skills.

The missive was followed by a conciliatory dinner at one of the media magnate's palatial residences outside Milan. It was a sticky occasion, by all accounts, which ended with Berlusconi's wife and daughter watching TV talk shows debate the family row, while father and son watched the football.

But even the match was unlikely to improve his mood, as Roma thrashed AC Milan, which Berlusconi owns.

The saga, sparked by Berlusconi's public flirting at a TV awards dinner, is unlikely to do him any long-term political harm. His jocular suggestions that he would like to run away to a desert island with TV presenter Aida Yespica or that he would marry MP Mara Carafagna if he were free hardly amounted to a major indiscretion, but it was one straw too many for the back of Veronica Lario, his wife of 27 years and a former actress renowned for her own discretion.

An opinion poll for La Repubblica showed 55% of Italians disapproved of her decision to go public with her complaint.

On the other hand, many will have felt renewed admiration for the impenitent lothario who compresses so many of the nation's vices and virtues into the frame of a 70-year-old man. But with his heart beating to the rhythm of a recently installed pacemaker, and his appearance pepped up by a hair transplant and facelift, the former cruise ship crooner was still able to stir jealousy in a beautiful woman 20 years his junior, they observed with envious amazement.

Not everyone sympathised with Berlusconi, of course. Feminists flocked to support Lario, praising the seriousness of the message in her open letter to La Repubblica: that her husband's antics were not only damaging to her dignity as a woman but a thoroughly bad example for their three children as well.

OLDER members of his Forza Italia party seized the opportunity to complain that it had been invaded by politically clueless but glamorous actresses, such as the ones that had attracted Berlusconi's gallantries, and his wife's ire.

The Corriere della Sera newspaper called him to task for devoting his time since being ejected from office last spring to frivolous social pursuits, while keeping mum on any serious ideas he might have about tackling the country's manifold problems.

Some speculated there must be more to Lario's sensational revolt than met the eye: she was upset at being cut out of the lion's share of her husband's billions, which it is claimed will go to his children; or is planning to enter politics with his enemies in the centre-left, perhaps.

Film director Franco Zeffirelli seemed to endorse this in an open letter in the Corriere della Sera on Friday, in which he wrote: "It takes some courage to publicise such a banal little episode and blow it up in such a way that you legitimise any interpretation and every suspicion."

Ultimately the spat seemed to confirm two things: that the Italian public treats the alleged sexual misdemeanors of its leaders with surprising indulgence, and that the only really bad publicity in politics is silence.

Even when family matters spun out of his control, Berlusconi seemed to relish all the attention. Media magnate though he is, he only owns a part of it, yet still ended up with the world's press eating out of his hand.