Take an evening stroll along the promenade that separates the town centre from the sea and one’s first impression is that Bari is full of teenagers. Girls hang off Vespas, boys pass around cigarettes. After dark they come in their hundreds to the main square, in their hotpants and white jeans, to sit on the medieval wall that sweeps down to the harbour. Come summer, the wall wriggles with hundreds of pairs of tanned legs.

From Rome to Naples to the Sardinian coast, the scandal surrounding Silvio Berlusconi has reached this sprawling port city, on the hard-up heel of the Italian peninsula.

The saga that began with the Prime Minister’s puzzling relationship with the 18-year-old daughter of a “family friend” has prompted a political crisis, with allegations involving call girls, cocaine, a prostitution ring and the systematic recruitment of pretty young women paid to attend parties at Mr Berlusconi’s private homes. He has dismissed the allegations surrounding the sex scandal as rubbish and insisted that he has nothing to be ashamed of.

Patrizia D’Addario, the escort who claims to have slept at Mr Berlusconi’s residence in Rome on the night Barack Obama was elected President; Barbara Montereale, the 23-year-old hostess who claims he gave her €10,000 (£8,500) “as a present”; Gianpaolo Tarantini, the businessman who allegedly introduced them. Here, in Bari’s seedy social scene, is the key to the questions Mr Berlusconi refuses to answer, prosecutors believe.

Arguably it is the relationships formed here, in what the Italian media like to call the undergrowth of the entertainment world, that are threatening to topple the most powerful man in Italy. “Obviously someone has understood that around here there is a fertile breeding ground of people who dream of being models, of being on television. Lots of really beautiful boys and girls,” says Manila Gorio, a transgender talent scout from Bari, who hosts reality television shows on the local network and runs a casting agency. “And they have thought of putting them into the right circles of important people.”

Mr Tarantini, who is under investigation for corruption and abetting prostitution, denies paying women for anything more than travel expenses. When asked if the “someone” to whom she refers is Mr Tarantini, Miss Gorio replies: “It’s a theory,” but declines to elaborate.

Miss Gorio calls Miss D’Addario her best friend and says she knows Mr Tarantini and “Nicola D”, the gay party organiser and alleged drug dealer who prosecutors believe is “crucial” to their inquiry, all from the Bari club scene. She talks of nights at a fashionable joint called Gorgeous, dancing on tables with Miss D’Addario in their bare feet and sharing bottles of champagne at Mr Tarantini’s table.

So far 19 women have been questioned by Bari prosecutors, among them Miss D’Addario and Miss Montereale, Lucia Rossini, 24, the former Big Brother contestant Angela Sozio, 36, and a local representative of Mr Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party called Elvira Savino, 32.

Each is from Bari and knows Mr Tarantini. And each was catapulted into direct contact with Mr Berlusconi, either eating at his table at Palazzo Grazioli in Rome, enjoying the luxury of his Sardinian home, Villa Certosa, or even being asked to stand as a candidate for his party. “It’s easy to find a girl who has hopes of entering the world of entertainment, taking her from the low level to something higher,” says Miss Gorio. So how and why are these veline, or “showgirls” — girls with no apparent political contacts — finding themselves in such close contact with the Prime Minister?

Barbara Montereale provides the most compelling explanation so far. Estranged from her unemployed mother, she lives in an apartment in Modugno, a Bari suburb, with her 13-month-old daughter. She told The Times that after meeting Mr Tarantini through Miss D’Addario, she agreed to work for him, earning €1,000 for every party she attended. “I have always said to Gianpaolo that if I go to a party where I don’t know people, then, being a hostess, it’s obvious that I will want to get paid. I don’t go to parties where I don’t know people for fun.”

She had tried a TV career on one of Miss Gorio’s reality programmes. But she claims it was the arrangement with Mr Tarantini that secured the rite of passage for any aspiring showgirl: an invitation to Villa Certosa.

At the villa Miss Montereale recalled a strange, almost competitive, atmosphere among the 20 other girls who were invited to a party in midJanuary. “There were a lot of girls who didn’t know each other. I didn’t even speak to most of them. The only person I knew was Gianpaolo.”

After the visit, during which she earned €11,000 — a €1,000 fee from Tarantini and the rest “a present” from Mr Berlusconi — she claims to have continued her contact with the businessman. “He called me to go to parties, always Berlusconi’s parties. Once I called him to see if there was any work. He would say, ‘don’t worry, bella, when there’s work, I’ll call you’.

“Then all the Noemi scandal broke, and the calls stopped.” She refers to Noemi Letizia, the teenage model from Naples. Mr Berlusconi has failed to give a coherent explanation of their relationship since it emerged she went to a party at his villa when she was 17.

But the girl from Bari had one more lifeline to VIP circles. For three summers, from the age of 18, she worked at the Billionaire club, a jetset institution owned by Flavio Briatore, a former team owner in Formula One. The exclusive club, a few kilometres along the coast from Villa Certosa, is the magic portal through which the pretty meet the powerful. Staff are not waitresses — they are Billionairinas.

When The Times met Miss Montereale she was wearing a tight powder-blue top, which formed part of the club uniform. On the back was written “High Class”. Who did you meet while working there? “Lots of VIPs.” She smiles and says no more.

In 2006 she claimed to have met the two most important men in Italy for anyone seeking fame: Mr Berlusconi and Emilio Fede, one of his closest associates and director of TG4, the news programme on a channel belonging to the Prime Minister.

“As always, two Billionairinas were chosen to keep company at the table. On that occasion, Fede presented me to Berlusconi,” she said. Mr Fede later claimed he had never met Miss Montereale and had to have his memory jogged by a photo of the two together.

A guide to showgirls

Velina The term started in the 1920s and refers to a type of paper. It was later used to refer to the guidelines issued to journalists by the Ministero della Cultura Popolare during the Fascist period.

It took on a different meaning in the 1990s thanks to a famous TV programme on Mediaset, which Berlusconi owns, called Striscia la Notizia, in which the day’s news was handed to the anchorman by two girls, one brunette and one blonde.

The girls became known as “Le Veline”. From this, they came to play an iconic role in Italian television, offering a fast-track to fame for pretty girls. There is also a television programme called Veline, in which all the girls participate in bikini beauty pageants that are held in main squares across Italy

Soubrette An old expression for the saucy woman character in comic theatre, which means “conceited”. The character was often the light love interest (think Carry on films). It has come to mean a showgirl

Meteorina A weathergirl.This is a popular role on Mediaset. The weathergirls are said to be handpicked by Emilio Fede, Mr Berlusconi’s close friend and director of the news programme on his television channel Valletta The woman assistant in television quiz shows

Source: Times database

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