So in some ways, at least to the internet behemoth’s PR department, the conviction yesterday of three executives for breaking Italian privacy laws must come as a relief: Google can for once cast themselves in their old and increasingly unconvincing roles of underdogs and good guys. They explain what happened on their blog:

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police.

The post is headed ‘Serious threat to the web in Italy’. The danger, according to Google, is that ‘the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.’ This is, frankly, unlikely. As the Google post observes:

European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence.

So even if their appeal were to fail in Italy, they would just need to go to the European Court, where they’d almost certainly win. The worldwide web isn’t in any imminent danger of disappearing – except, possibly, from Italy.

Someone who is likely to be cheered by the decision, for reasons of his own that have nothing to do with Google, is the Italian prime minister: as well as changing the law to protect himself, two of Berlusconi’s favoured tactics for avoiding prosecution and staying in power are insisting on his right to privacy and silencing media he doesn’t control. A law was recently passed making it illegal to incite civil disobedience online. If Google were really as concerned with ‘the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built’ as with their own bottom line, surely they’d have kicked up a stink about that, too.

San Gennaro (St Januarius) has a chapel in Naples Cathedral to himself, a church within a church, a bombastic Counter-Reformation affair of precious metals and rich marbles, encrusted with busts and frescoed to the rafters. The decoration celebrates his status as protector of Naples against pestilence, disaster and Vesuvius. The volcanic eruption on 16 December 1631 was the most severe since the one that entombed Pompeii.

Since at least the 17th century, Neapolitans have been giving the saint three chances a year to prove himself, through the miraculous liquefaction of his blood, encased in two phials within an ornamental glass reliquary. In May and September there are processions and week-long events around his relics but on 16 December the process is a desultory affair, in which even the prayers and chants of the zie (the aunts), a Greek chorus of ten middle-aged and elderly women, and the repeated tipping and turning of the precious blood by a succession of distracted looking priests, combine to absolutely no effect. The material behind the glass remains stubbornly resistant to gravity, like dried silt. I’d heard that when the blood fails to liquefy it’s considered a terrible augury only now to be told that it almost never does in December. The blood remained on display all day and as a trickle of people filed up to kiss the glass, a guardian was on hand to wipe it. They didn’t want San Gennaro to give the faithful swine flu.

The next day, fresh blue and white posters had gone up all over Naples: ‘Long live Berlusconi.’ The prime minister was still in hospital after being whammed in the face with a model of Milan Cathedral on 13 December (the souvenir shop at the base of Vesuvius had opportunistically unearthed a glittery blue replica of their own, though I can’t imagine why they had it in the first place). But he had let it be known that he shared the pain of those who despised him and loved those who loved him. At least until Vesuvius stirs again, San Gennaro seems to have lost the attention of Neapolitans – but Berlusconi has understudied the role with care. On top of everything else, il Cavaliere has now transformed himself into a martyr. On the plane home I read the new independent paper Il Fatto Quotidiano (‘the daily fact’): moves were in train to curtail political demonstrations and block critical internet sites, though President Napolitano was holding the line, for now.

Berlusconi’s reaction was predictable: he says he’s the victim of a left-wing conspiracy involving the courts, the media and even – a charge he hasn’t dared level before – the president of the republic. The prime minister said he needed immunity in order to run the country. Since he can’t have immunity, the logical upshot is that he can’t run the country. But logic has never been Berlusconi’s strong point. He promised to continue in government, ‘with or without the law’.

Last Saturday I went to a demonstration in Rome against the government’s attempts to curb (even further) the freedom of the press. It was an uplifting occasion, the Piazza del Popolo overflowing with up to 300,000 people. ‘The right to know, the duty to inform’ was the message of the day. But then my train home was delayed for a few minutes while the police manhandled a black woman out of her carriage. Apparently her ticket had expired, and she’d told them to fuck off. Unwise of her, certainly. But that’s the second time in as many months that I’ve witnessed the police harassing a black woman on the trains. Some citizens, it would seem, are still more equal than others.

Ferdinando Cefalù is a Sicilian aristrocrat in his late thirties who lives with his parents, his wife (Rosalina), his sister and a sexually harassed teenage servant in a crumbling palace in the fictional town of Agramonte, near Catania. At night, Ferdinando creeps (in every sense of the word) from the marital bed to spy on his sleeping teenage cousin from the bathroom window. So far, so Berlusconi. If the movie begins as a fairly nasty misogynist sex comedy, however, with Ferdinando also fantasising about murdering Rosalina in such imaginative ways as stabbing her in the back and bundling her into a vast cauldron in which she’s making soap, it soon turns into something much stranger.

When Rosalina’s old lover, Carmelo Patanè, presumed dead in the war, returns to the town and offers to restore the frescoes in the Cefalù palace, Ferdinando decides to get rid of his wife for real by fixing her up with Carmelo and then shooting them both in a staged crime of passion, so he’ll be free to marry his underage cousin. It’s an insane project, and gets steadily more insane as Ferdinando gets hold of a hi-tech bugging device to eavesdrop on the lovers, at which point I started to wonder – perhaps a little hopefully – if the movie wasn’t somehow a veiled satire on Cold War political paranoia.

Ferdinando thinks his opportunity has come when the entire town, apart from Rosalina and Carmelo, piles into the cinema to watch La dolce vita. No one seems to notice that the film stars their local baron, but that’s probably because they’re all too distracted by Anita Ekberg and her breasts. It’s an extraordinary scene, in which the male gaze is turned in on itself in more ways than one. As the camera scans across the faces of the passively staring audience, the men look like caricatures, gawping personifications of scopophilia – until you compare them with the crowd watching while Fellini filmed Ekberg cavorting in the Trevi Fountain. Then you realise they just look like men. What a sorry lot we are. Here’s hoping Veronica Lario fleeces the prime minister for every centesimo she can get.

The worst of it is that all the fuss about Berlusconi’s disintegrating marriage is keeping actual news off the front pages: for example, that the Senate has just approved a law requiring doctors to report illegal immigrants to the authorities.