Today (February 9), Edmondo Bruti Liberati, the chief prosecutor in Milan, is submitting a request for a fast-track trial of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. He is alleged to have paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl, known as Ruby, who is now 18 and denies that they had sex. A Moroccan nightclub dancer whose real name is Karima El Mahroug, Ruby was detained for alleged theft by police but freed after a phone call from the prime minister.
Although frequenting prostitutes is not a crime in Italy, having sex with one under the age of 18 is an offence that commands a prison sentence.
Berlusconi denies the sex allegations, insisting they are politically motivated.
Recently, the author Roberto Salviano examined in Die Zeit the phenomenon of Silvio Berlusconi. Italians identify with him, he writes, and admire him, not in spite of his blatant untruthfulness but because of it, not in spite of his contempt for the law but because of it. Italians recognize in his inner contradictions and even in his immorality a profound truth about themselves.
To them, he is the quintessential entrepreneur who reached the top through shameless cunning. Moreover, Italians see in Berlusconi a virtuoso communicator who has convinced the nation that, although 75 and in precarious health having endured a prostate operation, he is still capable of satisfying his harem. Nobody objects to Berlusconi consorting with prostitutes. Everybody applauds him when he says that admiring a pretty girl is better than being gay or taking drugs. But appointing his women ministers to the cabinet, or to other leading positions, that is another matter.
Italians say, “If we all have to wallow in the mud, then at least let the best wallower win, the most cunning. We all have dead bodies in our cellars and whores in our cupboards. Our adversaries are just as muddy as we are, but we are more cunning.”
There are only two rules in Italian society: first, honesty is pointless. And, second, whoever has achieved anything can’t have done it honestly, whether or not he has written a bestseller, has become mayor of a city or head of a medical clinic.
Only in Italian society?
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Perhaps the best articulation of this so called view or hypocrisy was penned by Luigi Barzini in that lovely book, “The Italians”.
On another note, my 13 year old son remarked “I so love young people, the’re so sleek and sexy”. To which we can add “We so love Silvio because he is so dyed, deceitful and outrageous.”
James Surowiecki, in The Wisdom of Crowds, spent some time analysing how a crowd could be wise when no one trusted anyone else. The question was framed in terms of an Italian soccer team, which would never lose except that the referee was crooked, the coach was bribed, the players took a fall, or whatever. In short, the same as in the text: no one achieves anything by honest effort or loses because their own honest effort falls short.
Just about impossible to build a working democracy on those foundations. Why would anyone contribute to the common good if *everyone* cheated?