Silvio Berlusconi: the pressure grows

The pressure on Silvio Berlusconi was mounting over the weekend after another woman talked to the Italian press about the prime minister's taste in private entertainment. Crucially, Barbara Montereale supported the story of Patrizia D'Addario, the TV showgirl who claimed last week that she spent the night with the Italian PM at his residence in Rome following an intimate dinner party on November 4 last year.

Twenty-three-year-old Montereale, described as a hostess, said that she travelled with D'Addario to Rome for the candlelit dinner at his official residence, the Palazzo Grazioli. They and another girl had been laid on by a businessman, Giampaolo Tarantini, who was in the hospital supply business and allegedly looking for contracts.

"Everyone knew at the dinner that she was an escort," Montereale said of D'Addario in an interview with La Repubblica. At the end of dinner, she said, "the agreement was that Giampoalo and I would leave Patrizia alone with the prime minister, and that's what we did."

Montereale claims she went back to her hotel, and D'Addario did not return until the next morning. "She told me she had had sexual relations with the prime minister," said Montereale.

D'Addario, 42, gave the media more details on Saturday of her night at the Palazzo Grazioli. She said the 72-year-old PM told her to "go and wait for me in the big bed" while he took a shower. At breakfast the next morning she claims he gave her a multi-coloured tortoise encrusted with precious stones.

Both Montereale and D'Addario say she was not paid for staying the night - though she had been paid €1,000 for attending a party two weeks before, when she had chosen not to stay.  As The First Post reported last week, D'Addario had already told Berlusconi that she was having planning problems with a hotel she wanted to build in Bari. Berlusconi, she said, had promised to help sort this out. Montereale told La Repubblica that the reason why D'Addario "wasn't interested in money" was because she was more interested in the help he could give over the hotel project.

In the event, the help never materialised and D'Addario went to the press - and the police - with her story.

The pressure on Berlusconi to tell the truth is coming not only from his political opponents, but from the Roman Catholic Church, in the shape of the official newspaper of the Italian conference of bishops, Avvenire.James Walston, political science professor at the American University in Rome, said: "This is becoming more and more damaging, particularly since the Church has now waded in. It is not necessarily the scandal itself, but the fact that it seems he is no longer in control."

Walston says the timing is awful, with the G8 summit in L'Aquila coming up. "He'll have to spend a lot of time denying that he was involved in an escort service rather than being a statesman with the likes of Obama."

Or perhaps his G8 opposite numbers will agree with Vittorio Sgarbi, a former centre-right deputy culture minister, who says in today's Times that men of power need a lot of sex. "If Berlusconi does not gain sexual satisfaction he governs badly," he said. ·