Secluded and secretive, a prisoner of herself, of her own choice. Abnormal character Veronica Lario. Yes, because the new first lady of the Italians is a dissident in the universe of Forza Italia, and she is viewed with respect. If she doesn’t have a fan club as an actress, she can count on much more: a party section named after her, in the low Ferrara, in Copparo. It maintains autonomy of judgment and independence of thought, and pleases the left. Giuliano Ferrara dedicated the fund he wrote on the Sheet of Sheets (of which Lady Veronica is the majority shareholder) six days before the elections. The title was: “We, Berlusconi’s Veronica trend, will tell you how we vote.” A fund all played on a beat: “In tracing of the famous:” I am Marxist, Groucho trend “, we will say:” I am Berlusconi, Veronica trend “». The news is that there are also Veronica antiberlusconiani trend. In a country that spurs and rushes to the aid of the winners, she is never there. He does not appear, he gives himself the supreme luxury of staying at home. He chose self-eclipse and, if possible, he is still taking a step back in the shadow. Don’t count on me, it’s the password. Compared to 1994 there will be even less. For example, he has already made it known that he will not be present at the G8 in Genoa, sending the organization that has been working for months to the parallel program of planetary super wives into a tailspin. As soon as the polls were closed, he was already putting his hands out: I’m his partner, not the first lady of Forza Italia, I’m a wife, not a militant. The absence strategy can produce a deafening noise. Alongside an omnipresent and overexposed husband, the true communicator – mistress of the unsaid – is her, a media icon multiplied by silence. Yet it would be for Berlusconi a first lady of the most exportable, like his boats and his houses: of great representation

No, thanks: no to the limelight, no to photographs (and criticisms), no to worldly prominence. If you know it, you avoid it. Involuntary leader of this current forced (and not), Veronica Lario – name of art chosen when she acted as a tribute to Veronika Lake, Lario to echo the lake – never as in these hours it seems marked by great equilibrium and Olympic calm, from a common sense not at all common. To a lady who asked her if she didn’t miss the stage, she replied: “Oh no, if it were so it would be terrible.” He lives with his three children – as a mother and father – in the sumptuous Villa di Macherio that belonged to the Visconti family, remodeled, for a game of destiny, to Luchino’s favorite set designer, Mario Garbuglia. It is his ecological castle, very well armored but elegiac with the biodynamic vegetable garden, the antique furnishings, the great monumental kitchen in which stands a La Cornue gas machine, the most luxurious in the world. But Veronica does not like the luxuries exhibited. She is a woman anchored to her land, Emilia, one with a modest childhood behind her and her mother, who was soon a widow, who was doing the job at the Standa (an omen)? A woman who raises her children without a nanny, a little mother rhetoric; he sent them to the Steiner school, rationed the television even if less than once, he gave Luigi the computer, and in so-called pleasure trips – for example last July in New York – he obliges them, implacably and smiling, to visit all the most important museums. As for Barbara, the oldest, 17 years old in July, photographed from a magazine at a charity social dinner next to her friend Francesca Versace (caption: “It is already a small star of the Milanese jet set”), it would not be true that intends to be an actress, on her mother’s footsteps. The acting course he attended at the Piccolo is just one of the many courses he has taken on. She is a hyper protective mother. Some time ago, when her husband declared himself ready to swear on the heads of his three children, why not on his three televisions, then?

Before Silvio (but she, in front of the others, always calls him by his surname) threw himself headlong into the long electoral campaign, put him in a sort of self-help: a week of uninterrupted vacation together with her but above all with the boys. In recent years, Mrs. Berlusconi has tried to work, but the commitment was obviously not compatible with the double job of mother and wife, and so Athena 2000, her company specialized in the marketing of accesses to the telematic network, was sold. Veronica is also the majority shareholder of Foglio, of which she owns 38 per cent, purchased a couple of months after the newspaper’s publication, which she has always shown to be enthusiastic, perhaps because out of the usual framework of militant Berlusconi, hence an eccentricity to cultivate. However a great deal considering that the actions cost her two billion and 400 million and today the newspaper has been valued around thirty billion. But it is not a job that takes her time: Mrs Berlusconi is a publisher who does not interfere. It follows carefully, but at a distance, and lets it be known that it is very interested in the «La Feuille» project, a French edition of the newspaper, for now frozen. There are those who see in her the melancholy chrism of a certain solitude. At 43, maybe 45, she has very few friends, with whom she does the same things that normal women do when her husband isn’t there: at the movies and then a pizza, though rarely and with the bodyguard in tow, and instead of pizza maybe a tomato and mozzarella salad.He loves good food, he does not mortify himself with too many diets. She is healthy, yes, but without fanaticism and fundamentalism, basically simple tastes, so much so that her husband recently, at a dinner in Macherio with a dozen guests, was surprised to see caviar coming to the table: «Veronica, why? caviar?”. “But love, because we are rich,” she replied. He has irony and knows how to play the game. Sometimes she tells her husband the jokes about Berlusconi, if not those about Berlusconi’s wife. He speaks of it with respect, sometimes even a little fearful. With his closest collaborators he often emphasizes: “Veronica also says this”. She maintains her freedom of criticism: the Berlusconi she prefers is the one who smiles, the one who claims to appreciate satire, the one who likes Vincino sul Foglio, what the Bicameral does, what Ruggiero wants to do with foreigners. The Berlusconi from whom he disagrees is the one with temptations from Masaniello, the one who inflates his muscles, the one who is more Gascon. He marvels at his great looks, and he repeats jokingly: “We husbands of women with long hair like only those with short hair.” A Knight without checkers, at least in public. In the photoromanzopanegirico «Una storia italiana», on the cover of which Veronica & Silvio are photographed with the hand raised upwards and the finger pointing towards the horizon, Signora Berlusconi appears in a rhinestone evening dress next to her husband in a blue tuxedo (like it to the lawyer Agnelli). The caption says: “Zero in worldliness” and tells – high value added detail – how the two have been present in their life to a single before the Scala. Veronica, whose reference stylist is Armani despite her physicality is far more exuberant than the one – on the silencer – envisaged by the brand, did not even want to go to Luna Berlusconi’s wedding, Paolo’s second child, last September at Tolcinasco castle . Dell ‘Utri, Confalonieri, Previti, Fede and of course Silvio were in attendance, in the role of witness of the bride, with arrival – a little embarrassed at the late hour – of Natalia Estrada. A marriage of great magnificence, unlike that of Veronica, celebrated almost secretly at the municipality of Milan on 12 December 1990. The officiant was Paolo Pillitteri, one of the witnesses Bettino Craxi.