The Personal and il Politico

The topic of the Italian prime minister's marriage - and now, his divorce - has played out rather scandalously in Italian and international media outlets in the past five years. My poor reading skills in Italian leave me guessing a lot about what is being reported in la Repubblica, so I turn to the BBC and New York Times for supplemental information about and narrativization of the Berlusconis' very public marriage woes.

In several of the recent articles following Veronica Lario's (Mrs. Berlusconi, if you weren't quite sure) public outing of Berlusconi's alleged affairs with very young women, I have noticed an interesting move on the part of journalists to frame Lario's actions as decidedly feminist. In spite of the disapproving few who believe the Lario/Berlusconi saga should be worked out behind closed doors, Lario has chosen to remain vocal about Berlusconi's extramarital activities as well as what she sees as his inabilities as prime minister. Lario has even gained a following online that supports her election to a major political office - apparently not a regular occurrence for the First Ladies of Italy. The public airing of Lario's and Berlusconi's "personal" issues and the journalistic and popular responses to the situation serve as demonstrations of the blurring of personal and political realms. Further, Lario's insistence on publicizing their marital conflicts (and Berlusconi's subsequent insistence on a public apology from Lario) as an exemplar of how Italian women must hold their own in relationships with Italian men, suggests a possible challenge to a presumed, strict cultural divide between private and public in an Italian national context.

Image from the New York Times.