Veronica Lario: From the Shadows of Power to a New Beginning

She opens the window to the past, just this once. But not before explaining that she usually looks beyond, "through the one that faces the future". Veronica Lario breaks a silence that has lasted since 2009, the year of her separation from Silvio Berlusconi. Indeed, she makes her TV debut, as a guest on the show "A cena da Maria Latella" on SkyTg24. She talks about her first life, by the side of the former prime minister. And about the second, uphill life, treated as an "ungrateful showgirl" with "press and power against her", hence all to be rebuilt, leading a startup in artificial intelligence that deals with digital games. And again, the relationship with her children, the passion for horse riding which has become a sort of hippotherapy, her concerns for wars and the future of her ten grandchildren. She doesn't hide the emotion in recounting the last fifteen years lived "on a rollercoaster" where, she admits, "the hope of reuniting with my family in a balanced way" alternated with moments when "hope was lost". One thing was never missing, and Lario will repeat it several times: the closeness of her children "I was very close to them, as they were to me". The tone is never polemical, not even when the former wife of the Knight recalls the court battle for the separation: "There was a sentence that denied me any rights", she remembers and "which I respected and today I am a normal person, an entrepreneur". The dark moments were not lacking, and she does not deny it: "I wondered if it was possible to start over because I thought there was nothing more for me. I thought 'perhaps power has won', but in the end, I told myself it's not impossible and I tried". A new adventure, that in the world of startups and artificial intelligence, which binds her even more to her children. With Barbara in particular who, she confides, "is the most interested". She also indirectly mentions Jovanotti saying that "she thinks very positive" when it comes to the future of young people "a future - she explains - in which there are new dimensions like the metaverse". The tone changes, however, when talking about the present, about what happens in the world and in particular about wars. "They scare me - she says - because I was born 10 years after the end of the Second World War so many stories from my family, lived near Marzabotto, I have always listened to and experienced in a dramatic way". The great uninvited guest of the entire interview is obviously the former head of government. "I - she clarifies - have no reason to be blackmailable because I don't have any secrets with me. I have no secrets of Berlusconi's enterprises or his life and therefore I can say what I think regardless of my past that has no secrets". Of the life beside a Prime Minister and the choice of having been a first lady in the shadows, Lario has no regrets. "The characters that have passed in Berlusconi's salons have always been of great level - she recounts - and in some way, I have always been fascinated by them, but I never thought to find my own space within those dynamics. I was there because I respected a role, I tried to do it at my best and for me, it meant taking a step back". Those steps back that she "learned to take perhaps thanks to horse riding", Veronica tells of having taken them also in the face of attacks from "press and power" especially "when the press is bent to power"