Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's epically wealthy and willful prime minister, has long boasted of being a self-made man.
Has he now taken his dauntless odyssey in personal improvement further, becoming a re-made man?
Fueled by Berlusconi's disappearance from public view for much of the last month, that question has been the subject of whispers here that grew louder on Thursday, when an Italian newspaper quoted one of his doctors as saying the prime minister had had some "plastic surgery around the eyes."
A nip? A tuck?
"Don't ask me anything more, because I do not speak of such private things," said the doctor, Umberto Scapagnini, who had just spoken of them, according to an article in the Turin daily La Stampa.
Scapagnini, who is also the mayor of the Sicilian metropolis of Catania and a member of Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, would not receive a telephone call on Thursday afternoon at his City Hall office.
An assistant to the doctor said all inquiries were being referred to Berlusconi's political aides here in Rome.
But one of those aides said he had no information on the matter and no time to investigate it.
Berlusconi's aides said he had spent most of the last month holed up in his villa on the island of Sardinia because it was time, after his tumultuous six-month stint as president of the EU, to take a break. They said he would re-emerge here within the next few days.
He will presumably look rested.
Or will it be more than that?
"He will be blond and tall," said one associate, mocking the current rumors while also seeming to acknowledge, ever so subtly, Berlusconi's tendency toward cosmetic gilding.
Without spending much time in the sun, the prime minister nonetheless manages to keep pastiness at bay.
He reliably looks either bronze or somewhat orange, depending on the moment and the lighting.
He also looks less short than he really is -- an estimated 1.67m tall -- thanks to special padding on his seats, sizable heels on his shoes and his aides' relentless patrol of the photographs taken of him.
Those aides regularly try to peel away some of Berlusconi's 67 years, often by having him travel back in time.
During his 2001 campaign for prime minister, for example, images of him on posters and in advertisements showed a younger, leaner man with a much fuller head of hair.
That was a matter not only of vanity, say his critics, but also of strategy.
He appeared to be trying to reassure Italian voters of his vim and vigor in light of news that he had battled prostate cancer.
His recent, nearly complete absence from public view since around Dec. 20 prompted speculation that he might again be ill, but aides and political allies have denied that.
Scapagnini's comments, as quoted in La Stampa, also seemed to have been prompted by a desire to quash that speculation.
Some of Berlusconi's political opponents privately floated the possibility that the doctor was operating in the realm of political spin and planting a fictive tidbit to divert Italians' attention from Berlusconi's numerous political woes.
But chatter about the prime minister's possible adventures in aggressive cosmetology preceded and transcended that tidbit.
It reached the point where another Italian newspaper simply took the surgery for granted and ran an interview with an expert on eye jobs.
That article, in Thursday's issue of the Milan-based daily Il Libero, talked about "a small surgical intervention" that had suddenly appeared "under the eyes of everyone, but mainly under the eyes of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi."
Whatever is happening, Berlusconi must indeed keep his eyes, altered or not, on an array of challenges, including June elections for the European Parliament that will test his and his party's appeal.
"He needs to look good," one associate said.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
RSS