Vittorio Sgarbi, the mayor of Salemi in Sicily, is a notorious philanderer who is obsessed with art, beauty — and the mafia. James Silver spends a day with him
When Silvio Berlusconi was in trouble last year, accused of trysts with girls young enough to be his granddaughters, his former undersecretary for culture Vittorio Sgarbi rode nobly to his defence. ‘The thing you have to understand about Silvio,’ he declared, ‘is that unless he gains sexual satisfaction he cannot govern properly.’ Such a claim could only be taken seriously in Italy, where womanising is a national pastime and the more colourful public figures are widely admired. They don’t come much more colourful than Mr Sgarbi.
Now mayor of Salemi, Sgarbi is a celebrity in Italy. He is a revered art critic, known for his excoriating attacks on political and cultural opponents. He also appears as a ‘judge’ on prime-time television talent shows, surrounded, of course, by bikini-clad girls. His political allegiances are so flexible that they would make even a Liberal Democrat blush. Over the years, the 58-year-old has been a communist, an anarchist, a liberal, as well as a centrist who served in an earlier Berlusconi administration.
His mission now is to put Salemi on the map. It is a tiny, medieval town on the western coast of Sicily which was a stepping stone in Garibaldi’s unification of Italy and became the country’s first capital in 1860. One of Sgarbi’s first acts was to put 3,700 earthquake-hit houses on sale for E1 each, on the condition that buyers agreed to fund the restoration costs. The scheme has yet to be officially green-lit, but it was a publicity masterstroke attracting headlines and enquiries from as far away as America and South Korea.
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