"Che bella giornata!" Welcome to another issue of "Only In Italy", written by the most talented newsletter writers to ever drool on a keyboard.

Traveled to southern Italy and Sicily in the spring of 2006; Messina, Taormina, Sciacca, Agrigento, Cefalu, Sorrento, Cosenza, Marzi & Corleone, home of my grandfather. We were in Corleone 4 hours after Bernardo Provenzano was arrested and nobody was talking! We didn't find out about it till we returned to Sciacca and watched the TV news! Jackie

Thanks for your concern, Jackie.

Why were you surprised that the lovely people of Corleone did not talk? The town has 12,000 inhabitants and everyone is considered a suspect.

When you look at its criminal past, Corleone is a town that would be more than happy to disassociate itself from the rest of Italy. Sometimes the Corleonese feel Greenland is more a part of Italy than their town is.

Turin - January 25, 2007 - An Italian burglar was caught after failing to steal a digital camera which she had used to take a picture of herself.

Lucia di Matta, 46, took jewellery and other valuables from a flat in Turin, but left the camera with her picture on it after she decided it was old and not worth stealing.

An Italian police spokesman said: "She put it down on a table without realizing that she had accidentally taken her own picture with it."

Police identified her after the owner of the flat came back to find the money and jewellery missing but the extra picture on his digital camera.

The woman was given a suspended sentence and ordered to return the money and valuables to her victim.

Milan - February 1, 2007 - "Dear Editor," began a letter published Wednesday on the front page of La Repubblica, the newspaper that Silvio Berlusconi hates most. The scalding letter demanded a public apology from Berlusconi and it was signed by his wife.

And so, a nation bored and a little down at its return to semi-normal politics woke to a truly juicy news cycle with an inescapable conclusion: In or out of power, Silvio Berlusconi may be reprehensible, but Italy cannot keep its eyes off him.

It turns out that the 70-year-old former prime minister, who recently had a pacemaker implanted, attended an awards ceremony last week and was overly friendly with two young and beautiful guests.

"If I weren't already married, I would marry you right now," he reportedly told one. And another: "With you I would go anywhere."

"These are statements I consider damaging to my dignity," wrote Veronica Lario, 50, who has been with Berlusconi for 27 years. She said his remarks could not be "reduced to jokes."

"To my husband and to the public man, I therefore ask for a public apology, not having received one privately."

In divining what this could mean, Italians barely knew where to start.

Feminists called it an overdue rallying cry to Italian women like Lario, who has endured years of supposed infidelity (and no end of crude sex jokes, as when Silvio Berlusconi opened a political conference by praising the legs of the women in the front row). Political analysts said Berlusconi, who wants a third turn as prime minister, could never again win the votes of women and so was finished.

Then in the early evening, Berlusconi, who can never be counted out, wrote his own public letter: "Your dignity does not matter: I will guard it like a precious material in my heart even when thoughtless jokes come out of my mouth," he wrote. "But marriage proposals, no, believe me, I have never made one to anyone.

"Forgive me, however, I beg of you, and take this public testimony of private pride that submits to your anger as an act of love. One among many. A huge kiss. Silvio."

In the end, it seemed an especially spicy episode in the long and complicated relationship not only between Silvio and Veronica, but between Silvio and Italy. The private drama of Italy's richest man, its shrewd, shady and irrepressible personification, became something public, possibly even relevant politically and psychically.

"We have for eight months a notably boring government," said Giuliano Ferrara, an editor and informal aide to Berlusconi, referring to the responsible and restrained stewardship of Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who beat Berlusconi in elections last spring.

"And right now there is an explosion of strange and weird vitality, the heart that keeps on pumping. People miss very much that style. It's not healthy, but it's Italian."

Indeed, Italy's top three evening talk shows devoted their entire programs to an unusual public exchange of letters between a married couple. Beppe Severnigni, one of the most prescient commentators on Italian mores, quickly churned out a column for Corriere della Sera summing up its import.

"The man is a walking oxymoron, but it has not stopped him from working his way up," he wrote. "Why? Simple: because he embodies the Italian dream of being everything, of pleasing everyone (and indulging himself in everything), without giving up anything."

Perhaps all marriages are mysteries on some level, but the drama also shed light on one of Italy's most visible but ambiguous couples. They met in 1980, when he was a budding, and married, builder and she was a beautiful B-movie actress appearing in a play in Milan. He saw her onstage, the story goes, and fell deeply in love.

He left his first wife, married Lario and they had three children (he already had two).

He grew richer, entered politics in the mid-1990s, and the two seemed somehow together yet increasingly apart.

No small amount of his public persona was linked to his constant, earthy joking about women and his mastery of them, amid rumors that monogamy was not among his virtues.

"I lost my hair because I had too many girlfriends," he once said (he has since had implants).

Through it all, Lario remained largely silent, a fact she noted acidly in her public letter on Wednesday. "I chose not to leave space for marital conflicts, even when his behavior created reasons to do so," she wrote.

But not entirely: She made no secret over the years that her personal political views were more to the left than to her husband's right.

Maria Latella, an Italian journalist who wrote a biography of Lario, "Tendenza Veronica," recalled that during Silvio Berlusconi's first term as prime minister in 1994, a newspaper article appeared saying that every day he sent flowers to someone.

He contended they were to his wife. But Latella noted that Lario sent the newspaper a brief letter saying that, in fact, she never received flowers from Palazzo Chigi, the seat of government.

Lario also spoke candidly in the biography, saying that she rarely saw him but that she considered their marriage stable and herself "the perfect kind of wife for the kind of man Silvio is.

"He can concentrate on himself and his work knowing his wife won't create a fuss if he's away from his family," she said in the biography.

As fate would have it, on the very same day that Lario fired off her letter, part of an interview was published with her husband, also given to Latella for her magazine, A.

"She has never made me look bad, never, while the wives of certain other politicians," he said. "And then she is so indulgent. What more could I want?"

Rome - January 28, 2007 - A resourceful group of Italian robbers used a severed finger to defeat a bank's security system and steal 10,000 Euros ($12,900). The only problem was they left the finger behind.

The bank on the outskirts of Rome was equipped with "Bio Digit" which records the digital imprint of the index finger of each person who pushes the entry button on the airlock.

According to the Italian media on Saturday, the two robbers used "the finger of the right hand from a body, perhaps that of a woman," to mask their digital identity and gain access to the bank.

The hold-up went perfectly; except for when police arrived they found the finger in question lying on the pavement in front of the bank.

"One can imagine the finger was kept in ice to stop it decomposing."

"Investigators are checking morgues to see if any bodies are missing a finger, and making sure it doesn't belong to someone on file," reporters said.