HOWZAT

While D’Addario waited, she went to the bathroom and took photographs. She later switched her recorder on and the tape captured the voice of a man asking: “Do you want tea or coffee?” She left the residence at about 11am.

On her return to Bari that afternoon, D’Addario also recorded a call on her mobile phone. “Bambina mia \!” Berlusconi greeted her. He asked her why she sounded as though she had a hoarse voice and she explained: “It was the showers.”

D’Addario, who has a 13- year-old daughter, has given prosecutors six audio tapes, one of which was allegedly recorded that night, and which include intimate details; she also filmed the bedroom with her mobile phone.

She had already recorded parts of a dinner party at the same residence two weeks earlier which, she says, she was paid £850 to attend.

Telephone taps for the investigation into Tarantini include dozens of explicit conversations in which Berlusconi talks to him about politics, parties and above all women, the magazine L’espresso reported on Friday. Berlusconi described what kind of women — down to hair colour and vital statistics — he wanted to invite to Rome and his Villa Certosa in Sardinia.

The conversations were often coarse, with Berlusconi chatting about what had happened on party nights. In a video on the magazine’s website he wears a white dinner jacket at a Villa Certosa party on August 11, 2008, attended by some 40 guests, many of them young women. Tarantini sits opposite the prime minister.

One of the guests, Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran, sings Ordinary World to shrieks from the women. Berlusconi then sings himself. The video also shows scantily dressed young women on merry-go-round horses in the estate’s grounds.

In an interview with The Sunday Times last week, Montereale denied doing “anything erotic” at Berlusconi’s home. “Tarantini paid me for going to the party as a hostess, not as an escort girl,” she said.

She has said that Berlusconi gave her £8,500 as a gift after a party in Sardinia in January because she was struggling to make ends meet.

Prosecutors have so far questioned some 20 women who are understood to have taken part in five parties at Berlusconi’s Rome residence and at least two in Sardinia.

The prime minister exuded confidence last week, saying he had no plans to change. “The Italians want me. I have a 61% popularity rating. They want me because I’m kind, generous, sincere, loyal and I keep my promises,” he said. Three weeks ago he had boasted that private surveys showed 75% of Italians approved of him.

In his first admission that he may have made a mistake, he said: “Unfortunately we invited the wrong person and he in turn invited the wrong person. But that happens to hundreds of people.”

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