“An incomprehensible mystery for many Europeans”. This is what the Magazine of the French newspaper Le Monde wrote in October regarding Silvio Berlusconi, who survived – miraculously, according to French journalists – after a summer full of scandals, first with the Noemi case, and then the revelations of prostitute Patrizia D’Addario.

Two months later, the French magazine is still dealing with the topic through a provoking add in which “the world according to Berlusconi” is represented like a giant breast, an explicit and evocative image of the Prime Minister’s well-known “passions”.

In the ad, made by the Parisian agency Publicis Conseil, four different “versions” of the Earth are represented in no more than twenty seconds. The first one is the most common, seen from a shuttle, with the meticulous division of oceans and continents; the second one is “filtered” by George Bush’s look and presents a division between the good guys (the Americans) and the evil ones (the rest of the world). Then there is the planet seen by the mafia, portrayed like a worrying bullet and finally the breast of dissention, which we will be talking for a while.

So, two images out four recall, in a not very nice way, Italian society and put side by side - probably in a malicious way – the Mafia with the Italian Prime Minister. In the commercial language this is called subliminal advertising. Certainly the Prime Minister, who has great experience in publicity, cannot have missed this detail. So will new legal action against the “communist” be brought forward? We’ll see.

Translated by Chiara Nunnari from John Milton Institute