Silvio Berlusconi has had a Mussolini moment, thanks to the man who attacked him
It had already been a terrible year for the Italian prime minister. Castigated by the Roman Catholic Church for his dalliances with showgirls, sued for divorce, accused of sleeping with a prostitute and facing two corruption trials, the last 12 months of personal and political pitfalls were capped last weekend when he was struck in the face with a souvenir model of Milan's cathedral.
Yet even as many Italians felt unexpected sympathy for the terrible injuries suffered by their sometimes embarrassing leader, and wondered whether his famous verve would ever fully recover, a handful noticed a striking - and perhaps significant - parallel with a notorious predecessor.
More than 80 years earlier a young Italian politician who, like Mr Berlusconi, wanted to make Italy strong again was attacked and suffered facial injuries which meant that - also like Mr Berlusconi - he was next seen in public with a bandage covering part of his face.
That politician was Benito Mussolini, the prime minister at the time and subsequently the Fascist dictator who made the trains run on time - and took Italy to war in alliance with Nazi Germany. A photograph of the bandaged Mussolini, whose nose had been grazed by a badly aimed shot at his head, showed him displaying defiant insouciance - much as Mr Berlusconi, his face similarly bandaged, tried tp after four nights in Milan's San Raffaele hospital last week.
Mr Berlusconi's assailant was an angry Italian man with a history of mental illness, and doctors said that the attack could have killed him. As it was, it left him with a broken nose, two cracked teeth, and blood pouring down his face. Mussolini's assailant was an angry 50-year-old Irish aristocrat, Violet Gibson, who shot at him as he was leaving a meeting in 1926, grazing his nose. She was lucky to escape being lynched. She was instead deported to Britain and spent the rest of her life in a mental hospital in Northampton.