My experience of true love has been magnified by cultural difference but there’s a universal lesson (Picture: James Appleton) Berlusconi and German chancellor Angela Merkel shake hands during the 2008 Italy-Germany summit in Trieste

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Relationships are different, of course, but the same principles apply. Grand romantic gestures tend to be rare, and for me to look someone in the eye and tell them how I felt about them was always deeply uncomfortable. I used to simply hope my affection shone through with my actions rather than my words. The former Italian prime minister with George W Bush, right, and first lady Laura Bush, on his arrival at Bush’s Prairie Chapel Ranch in Texas in 2003 All my friends and family are so excited to meet you!’ That was my Italian then-girlfriend, Maggie, a couple of months into our relationship. For every Italian that hated him for his monopolistic control of the media and abuse of power, there was another who admired his business acumen and was amused by his lowbrow larks. As the writer Curzio Malaparte wrote, Berlusconi’s qualities and defects “are the qualities and defects of all Italians”. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ My experience of true love has been magnified by cultural difference but there’s a universal lesson here. When a 17-year-old Moroccan nightclub dancer known as Ruby the Heartstealer, who had been arrested for a petty crime, told police she knew Berlusconi, the claim set in motion a chain of events that would bring about the mogul’s downfall. Born in 1936 in Milan to a bank clerk father and housewife mother, he attended a Catholic college, where he began a complicated relationship with the Church, which supported him until the mounting allegations of sleaze “superseded the limits of decency” in the view of at least one weekly Catholic newspaper. Perhaps the most surprising part of the Italian crisis is that Berlusconi has emerged as a selfless voice of reason The absence of unprompted loving declarations came across as an imbalance: if she could say and do these things, why couldn’t I? Surely that meant I loved her less? And when she took the time to express these concerns, I felt uncomfortably pressured to behave in a way that was alien to me.

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Ironically, if Berlusconi had not interceded, claiming she was the niece of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian despot, the case might have ended there. Maggie was far more outwardly affectionate. She would have no problem using terrifying words like ‘love’ and telling me, both in person and via text, how happy being together made her.

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You learn to see its depth in the squeeze of a hand or the twitch of a half-smile. It’s about the cup of tea made unasked at the end of a rough day, the furtive glances at a party, the tipsy laughter on a bus ride home on Saturday night. It’s yours, and that ownership is more meaningful than any preconceptions you had.

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Understandably, when we moved from a young relationship to something more serious, she expected clearer demonstrations of how I felt. However, the more time we spent together, the more obvious our different expectations of how to show love became.Meanwhile, I became better able to communicate my emotions, understanding the moments when I needed to go beyond my comfort zone to make her feel loved. On our first anniversary as a couple, I brought out my best Italian to post a gushing statement about the impact she’d had on my life and how she’d made me a better person. It helped me to build my confidence. Then, of course, I got down on one knee – much to the chagrin of my mother-in-law, who didn’t get the same gesture from Maggie’s dad! But, ultimately, it was not the “bunga bunga” parties that undid him, but his inability to cope as Italy’s debt reached unsustainable levels in 2011, when he was forced to resign in favour of technocrats. Silvio Berlusconi, the boastful billionaire media mogul who, despite scandals over his sex-fuelled parties and allegations of corruption, was Italy’s longest-serving prime minister, has died at the age of 86. A one-time cruise-ship crooner, Berlusconi used his television networks and immense wealth to launch his long political career, during which he inspired both loyalty and loathing.

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A modest plan to make his homes more attractive by offering a local cable TV service, Telemilano, which showed light entertainment and reruns of American soap operas such as Dallas, grew into a network of local channels until, by the end of the 1980s, his trash TV empire of game shows and barely clothed hostesses came to dominate the Italian airwaves. In 1994, he took 21 per cent of the vote in the general election and found himself prime minister, beginning a two-decade domination of Italian politics through which he shamelessly advanced his own interests. Maggie and I first met at university in London but it wasn’t until a chance encounter at Pisa airport a couple of years later – me travelling, her in her native land – that we got to see each other in a different context and went from classmates to something more. I’d agreed to go with her to a childhood friend’s wedding and all I could feel was a wave of panic. How do they know who I am? Why does it sound like I’m already a fixture? Isn’t there some kind of process to this?Berlusconi raises the Champions League trophy aloft alongside AC Milan players after they beat Liverpool 2-1 in the 2007 final The “Clean Hands” corruption inquiries that took out a generation of Italian politicians eventually provided the motivation for that move. Power, he reasoned, would not only protect himself from prosecutors but allow him to defend his businesses.