FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT

Berlusconi’s Roman pleasure palace becomes home for the press

The Times’s man in Italy is taking up residence at Palazzo Grazioli, where the shameless premier partied in a bed gifted by President Putin
Berlusconi used Palazzo Grazioli for politics by day and wild parties by night
Berlusconi used Palazzo Grazioli for politics by day and wild parties by night
YARA NARDI/REUTERS

The new tenants moving into Rome’s Palazzo Grazioli will admire the frescoes, wall tapestries and chandeliers but will secretly be interested in one thing — finding the bedroom in which Silvio Berlusconi once kept the bed Vladimir Putin gave him.

That was back when the former Italian prime minister lived on the first floor of the 16th-century palazzo and used it for political meetings by day and parties with beautiful women by night, shocking the actor George Clooney, who showed up one evening in 2008 to discuss aid to Africa, only to be shown the bed.

“I’ve had one evening with Berlusconi and it was one of the more astonishing evenings of my life,” he later reported.

Patrizia D’Addario, a former escort, spent a night