By Nick Squires , Rome. They were no ordinary dinner parties and no ordinary dinner guests. And then there's me - and I do what I do. It was, she said afterwards, "a scene of desolation, cheap vulgarity, a caricature; he really is sick". Another woman described the scenes at Villa San Martino as "a whorehouse". The discussions, detailed in transcripts of officially authorised telephone taps, are among a tidal wave of salacious detail that has emerged over the last few days, placing Mr Berlusconi under unrelenting pressure at a time when he is politically weakened and has just had his immunity from prosecution diminished by Italy 's constitutional court.
Silvio Berlusconi's women. Pope criticises Berlusconi. The Caligulan court of Silvio Berlusconi laid bare. It is hard to imagine that in any other parliamentary democracy a prime minister could withstand such an onslaught, with Italian newspapers devoting page after page to the scandal every day. The country's biggest opposition party is aiming to collect the signatures of 10 million Italians on a petition calling for Mr Berlusconi to resign, while a national newspaper, La Repubblica , compiled a list of his "10 biggest lies".
On Saturday the paper carried an interview with one of the women in the Milan prostitution investigation, in which she became the first to state publicly that she had sex with Silvio Berlusconi , although she denied that it was in exchange for money. Maria Ester Garcia Polanco, 25, a model and aspiring showgirl from the Dominican Republic, said she had gone to bed with the prime minister out of gratitude because he had paid for medical treatment for her five-year-old daughter and had helped her find work as a television showgirl, including on a programme called The Hot Chick and the Dork.
And yet, despite this extraordinary deluge of material, Mr Berlusconi is this weekend laying the groundwork this weekend for another Houdini-like escape, marshalling his lawyers to argue that prosecutors in Milan do not have the jurisdiction to bring the charges against him.
The challenge he now faces is his greatest yet. He has been mired in sex scandals before, including claims that he slept with call girls. But this time is that he is accused of having sex with a prostitute who was under 18, and then of trying to cover it up — crimes which, if proved, would carry prison sentences of up to three and 12 years respectively.
