Videoblog

This wonderful video was filmed by an amateur cameraman and sent to the Italian daily La Repubblica. In the week of Christmas, he set out to find wolves in the Apennines near Bologna. And, as the final sequences of the video show, he had a closer encounter than he expected.

Is this the start of something worrying? Queueing to hand in his lists of candidates, the leader of the Five Star Movement finds a striking amount of common ground in a chat with a candidate for the Casa Pound neo-fascist movement. At one point, Grillo says that a “lad” from Casa Pound could join the Five Star Movement if he fulfilled the requisites. That’s stating the obvious, but it looks very much as if he was throwing them a line.

The fun and games start after a minute. A guest on the show of Michele Santoro, Berlusconi tries to read out a list of the convictions for libel of his arch-critic, Marco Travaglio, a contributor to the programme. Travaglio stays calm, but Santoro loses his temper, interrupts Berlusconi and then refuses to shake his hand. At the end, Berlusconi takes Travaglio’s chair, but cleans with his handkerchief. For my money, that’s game and set (though possibly not match) to the Great Communicator.