Social scene in Bari ‘holds key’ to questions Silvio Berlusconi still won’t answer

Take an evening stroll along the promenade that separates the town centre from the sea and one’s first impression is that Bari is full of teenagers. Girls hang off Vespas, boys pass around cigarettes. After dark they come in their hundreds to the main square, in their hotpants and white jeans, to sit on the medieval wall that sweeps down to the harbour. Come summer, the wall wriggles with hundreds of pairs of tanned legs. From Rome to Naples to the Sardinian coast, the scandal surrounding Silvio Berlusconi has reached this sprawling port city, on the hard-up heel of the Italian peninsula. The saga that began with the Prime Minister’s puzzling relationship with the 18-year-old daughter of a “family friend” has prompted a political crisis, with allegations involving call girls, cocaine, a prostitution ring and the systematic recruitment of pretty young women paid to attend parties at Mr Berlusconi’s private homes. He has dismissed the allegations surrounding the sex scandal as rubbish and insisted that he has nothing to be ashamed of. Patrizia D’Addario, the escort who claims to have slept at Mr Berlusconi’s residence in Rome on the night Barack Obama was elected President; Barbara Montereale, the 23-year-old hostess who claims he gave her €10,000 (£8,500) “as a present”; Gianpaolo Tarantini, the businessman who allegedly introduced them. Here, in Bari’s seedy social scene, is the key to the questions Mr Berlusconi refuses to answer, prosecutors believe. Continue ...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6586566.ece