Silvio Berlusconi celebrates his 80th birthday on Thursday with a girlfriend nearly half a century his junior and a family he regrets neglecting as he pursued his business and political careers.
Silvio Berlusconi celebrates his 80th birthday on Thursday with a girlfriend nearly half a century his junior and a family he regrets neglecting as he pursued his business and political careers.
The former Italian Prime Minister and media tycoon has largely been absent from public life since undergoing open heart surgery in June and he says he plans to stay out of politics, an ungrateful mistress he now claims he never truly loved.
“I look towards the future still uncertain about what it may have in store,” he said in an interview with one of his publishing empire’s own magazines, Chi, to mark the milestone.
“What I have come to realise, perhaps the most important thing, is that I will spend more time with my children and my grandchildren. I will dedicate more time to the people that I love and that is the way it should be: five children and ten grandchildren have turned me into a patriarch,” he added.
Despite his penchant for hair transplants and plastic surgery, even Mr Berlusconi has not been able to stop the march of time. He underwent successful surgery in June to replace a faulty heart valve that could have cost him his life. It was not his first intimation of mortality. He had a pacemaker fitted after a heart attack a decade ago and he was operated on for prostate cancer in 1997.
“Throughout my life I have never given any thought to my age. On the contrary I always lived as if I had 40 years because that is how I felt: full of curiosity and desire to do things,” he added.
Twice divorced, Mr Berlusconi has lived for several years with Francesca Pascale, 31.
“Then the (heart) illness arrived out of the blue. And with the operation I underwent I had a very strong realisation that I am an 80-year-old man,” he revealed.
Other regrets include not being able to give enough time to his beloved AC Milan in recent years.
The seven-times champions of Europe have dropped to the level of also-rans in recent seasons having being starved of funds by their owner, who is now in the process of offloading the club to Chinese investors.
“If Milan has not done as well as before these past years, it is because I have not had the time to personally take care of it,” he lamented. That, he claims, is the fault of politically-biased judges who have pursued him in a string of legal cases ranging from corporate tax fraud to having sex with an underage courtesan at one of his notorious Bunga Bunga parties.
