For the correspondent in Rome, tired of trying to understand the inner workings of Italian politics, relief is now at hand: the prospect of a nice warm bath in a sunken pool.
Coincidentally, Silvio Berlusconi was enjoying some of his more breathtaking ‘bunga bunga’ shenanigans in the bath, when he was gyrating with young women less than a third of his age.
On Monday, the foreign press corps moved to a grand palazzo in Rome last owned by the former prime minister, known as ‘Il Cavaliere’.” (The Knight).
The water to the bath was still flowing when one of the Foreign Press Association’s approximately three hundred international correspondents tried the taps.
The last home of the press corps, a building around the corner from the famous Trevi Fountain, was sold to become a five-star hotel.
After a difficult search for a new location, the 16th century Palazzo Grazioli was chosen.
It was Berlusconi’s home base for many years, both when he was prime minister and afterwards, when he was forced to resign in 2011 due to an acute debt crisis.
Apart from the sunken bath, perhaps the most startling feature is the secret door hidden behind a wooden bookcase in one of the rooms where journalists will now fine-tune their copy.
Thanks to a hidden handle, the bookcase can be opened with a creak, revealing a dark room and an old wooden door.
The door leads to a back staircase that opens into the palazzo’s courtyard – perhaps the perfect escape for a harried correspondent whose foreign editor is on the warpath after a missed deadline.
Another wide staircase is overlooked by the stuffed head of a Javan rhino, which was shot in 1879 by an Italian duke, an ancestor of the aristocratic Grazioli family that still owns the building.
The foreign press association has literally taken over the entire first floor of the palazzo – known in Italian as the ‘piano nobile’ – the noble floor, where bedrooms and reception rooms are traditionally found.
George Clooney once stopped by here, hoping to speak to the Prime Minister about the aid efforts in Darfur. Berlusconi had other ideas.
“It was a very different evening than everyone thought,” the Hollywood actor later recalled. “I was like, ‘I gotta go’ and he said, ‘No, where are you going? There’s going to be a party,’ and I thought, ‘No, I have to go, really’.”
Much of the original decoration and furnishings have been preserved. Huge tapestries and oil paintings hang on the walls, alongside delicately etched mirrors and chandeliers. Frescoes on the ceilings depict muscular classical heroes, cherubs with thick thighs and scantily clad nymphs.
‘How beautiful’
“Che bello – how beautiful,” said Alina Trabattoni, member of the foreign press club. “It’s almost too much.”
The high costs of renting the property are paid by the Italian state.
The arrangement has its origins in the fascist era; Mussolini wanted to gather all foreign journalists in one location so he could keep an eye on them.
Rome’s correspondents belong to a privileged group. There are a handful of other foreign correspondent clubs around the world, in places like Hong Kong, Bangkok and Tokyo, but they rarely offer the lavish facilities of those in Rome.
There was a stir when journalists of many different nationalities, from Canadian and Iranian to British, French, German and Turkish, showed up for work on Monday and admired the lavish decor.
“It’s just like the first day of school. You half expect everyone to put down their pencils and pencil cases,” said a British colleague.
The toilets have been left as they were when Berlusconi lived here, complete with baths and copper taps. Water still flows from the taps, offering the promise of a long lunch break in the tub.
‘Smothered by kisses’
The Telegraph’s allocated desk space is in Berlusconi’s former bedroom – unfortunately the double bed he was said to have received as a gift from Vladimir Putin has been removed.
It was here that he invited a prostitute named Patrizia D’Addario to spend the night. She wrote an excruciatingly detailed account of the encounter in a book called Premier, Take Your Pleasure.
“He told me he wanted contact with my skin, he held me tight, he took my breath away… He smothered me with kisses,” Miss D’Addario wrote. “We kissed an endless number of times, with him mainly kissing my private parts.”
His endurance was such that “he could get into the Guinness Book of Records”. He kept her awake all night, she said. “There were times when I feared I wouldn’t be able to resist his attacks. Is he taking anything? I’ve often asked myself that.” She mused that perhaps his energy came from the “disgustingly sweet” herbal tea he drank.
She was invited by the Prime Minister to return to the palazzo and was not the only woman in his sights on that occasion. “As an escort I thought I had seen it all – but twenty women for one man was a new experience.”
Journalists can now wander down a long corridor where Berlusconi and Putin were photographed beaming as they threw a ball at one of the Italian prime minister’s white poodles, named Dudu.
Libidinal era
At the height of the Bunga Bunga scandals, when the Prime Minister was entertained by young models and aspiring actresses, a few of them, dressed in little black dresses, took pictures of each other as they posed in front of the mirror, using a hairdryer as holding a gun. if they were Bond girls.
Inevitably, the photos leaked and have become one of the enduring images of Berlusconi’s salacious era. Correspondents joked about finding thongs and panties in the bathroom cabinets.
Berlusconi, a three-time prime minister and billionaire businessman, died last year.
There is a bar with a display of Campari bottles as its centrepiece; the drinks maker is one of the place’s sponsors, along with Barilla, a pasta company, and the chocolate company Ferrero.
“I think with our last place we probably had the best foreign press club in the world,” said Philip Willan, a British journalist who has lived in Italy for decades and writes from time to time for The Times.
“With this new place there can no longer be any doubt.”