In typically flamboyant style, Silvio Berlusconi has invited the world’s press on board Europe’s largest cruise ship tomorrow to hear him announce his plans for hosting next month’s G8 summit.

Italy’s billionaire prime minister — a former cruise ship crooner — has been trying to portray himself as a statesman dedicated to solving the global economic problems. But his efforts have been undermined by fresh disclosures about his alleged night with a prostitute and explicit telephone conversations with a fixer who paid beautiful young women to attend his parties.

Patrizia D’Addario, 42, a former actress from Bari in southern Italy, says she spent the night of November 4, when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, at Palazzo Grazioli, Berlusconi’s Rome residence. She described the experience: “I never slept . . . He was tireless, a bull.”

Berlusconi, 72, has branded her account “trash and lies”, saying he did not remember her. He had never paid a woman for sex, he explained, adding: “I never understood what the satisfaction is when you are missing the pleasure of conquest.”

Accounts given to acquaintances and prosecutors led to an investigation into the alleged fixer, Giampaolo Tarantini, 34, a Bari businessman. He is suspected of abetting prostitution.

D’Addario described a dinner party that lasted until 3am and what followed. The other guests at the imposing Palazzo Grazioli were Tarantini and two young women — Barbara Montereale, 23, a model, and Lucia Rossini. After the dinner, Berlusconi led D’Addario and the two other women to another room.

“Do you remember how he caressed me while we were on the sofa? And how he caressed you and looked at me?” D’Addario asked Montereale in a telephone call recorded on June 7.

Montereale replied: “It was disgusting, he did everything in front of the bodyguards.”

Berlusconi asked D’Addario to stay and told the other two to leave. Photographs allegedly taken in Berlusconi’s bathroom by Montereale and Rossini before they left, in which they laughingly pose with a hairdryer, are timed 3.57am.

According to D’Addario, Berlusconi led her to a four-poster bed with white drapes and quilt which he said were a gift from Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister. She said he took half-a-dozen ice-cold showers during the night and she joined him at his request.

At one point D’Addario later told a friend: “He suddenly stopped moving and I thought to myself, thank God, he’s fallen asleep. But it didn’t last.”

D’Addario confided she had felt embarrassed when a staff member walked into the bedroom in the morning with a suit for the prime minister, reminding him he was due to make a statement about Obama’s victory. Berlusconi told her to wait because he wanted to have breakfast with her.

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