Has Italy come to its senses? The Italians I know always seemed to be mildly surprised at how Silvio Berlusconi got the job, and even more surprised at how he stayed there. Meanwhile, talking about politics (call it that), it seems that Juan Antonio Roca, the man at the heart of the Marbella mafia soap opera, had apparently amassed the fourth largest fortune in Spain through his property wheeling and dealing (his mentor Jesús Gil, the late former Marbella mayor and former president of Atlético de Madrid, is pictured above in all his Brad Pitt-like glory.) Roca seems to be a combination of cleverness and amorality who covered the possible paper trails as the cash stacked up: Spaniards seem already to be resigned to the notion that he'll get off lightly. He had stuffed animals, including a giraffe, in his house (and the ecologists are on his tail, too); he had an original Miró hanging in his bathroom. He declared a mere €150,000 a year to the taxman and was investigated a couple of years ago by a team that found nothing untoward. If a scriptwriter showed this story to a producer, they'd laugh him out of the office. But that's Marbella.