So, the truth of Veronica Lario's marriage to Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, is finally coming out. "I cannot be his babysitter," she writes in her book, Tendenza Veronica, published last week. But the surprise is not that the usually private and silent Veronica is now very publicly complaining about her husband, but more importantly: what took her so long?

For 19 years, Veronica Lario not only tolerated her spouse's wayward behaviour – alleged hair transplants, affairs – but concealed it from the world. Then, in April, she snapped. Her husband was photographed with an 18-year-old model at a party; Veronica thought he was on business in Naples. "It was the latest lie. Better, then, to try to seek a last way to respect myself, better to divorce," Veronica said. "I'm done."

What changed? "He broke the open rules," says Maria Princeton, 51, a businesswoman. "She knew he had an independent private life, knew he had affairs, but what he is doing is dissing her and dissing the kids, and that is out of bounds." ...

"Everybody assumes in those [Mediterranean] cultures that a prominent man will have one if not two mistresses," says Maria, who is half Italian and herself the daughter of a high-profile philandering father and a devout mother (who put up and shut up). "In fact, in Spain, you don't have as much status if you're not into that." But the controlling force behind it all is the family. "The Italians understand that it is not good for children or for the wife to divorce, because divorce means there will be another family."

"Veronica Lario kept her mouth shut for years because of her family," echoes Accettura. (Berlusconi has two children from his first wife; three children from Veronica.) "She did her best to protect her three children, because how do you divide the assets when there are five children?"

But what of the emotional cost? Does living separate lives really work? The actress Tilda Swinton certainly thinks so. She lives with John Byrne, the artist and writer and father of her two children, but also turned up at the Baftas last year with her boyfriend, Sandro Kopp.

"It's really, really straightforward," she has said. "Very, very often, people have children with people they are no longer sweethearts with… and then they have a relationship with someone new, right? What rarely happens is that they are still completely good friends and continue to live in the same house. But that's all it is." She said they would never separate. "We have a really lovely life bringing up the children together."

Labels: Europe, Italy, Marriage, open relationships

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