Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's epically wealthy and willful prime minister, has long boasted of being a self-made man.
Has he now taken his dauntless odyssey in personal improvement further, becoming a re-made man?
Fueled by Berlusconi's disappearance from public view for much of the last month, that question has been the subject of whispers here that grew louder on Thursday, when an Italian newspaper quoted one of his doctors as saying the prime minister had had some "plastic surgery around the eyes."
A nip? A tuck?
"Don't ask me anything more, because I do not speak of such private things," said the doctor, Umberto Scapagnini, who had just spoken of them, according to an article in the Turin daily La Stampa.
Scapagnini, who is also the mayor of the Sicilian metropolis of Catania and a member of Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, would not receive a telephone call on Thursday afternoon at his City Hall office.
An assistant to the doctor said all inquiries were being referred to Berlusconi's political aides here in Rome.
But one of those aides said he had no information on the matter and no time to investigate it.
Berlusconi's aides said he had spent most of the last month holed up in his villa on the island of Sardinia because it was time, after his tumultuous six-month stint as president of the EU, to take a break. They said he would re-emerge here within the next few days.
He will presumably look rested.
Or will it be more than that?
"He will be blond and tall," said one associate, mocking the current rumors while also seeming to acknowledge, ever so subtly, Berlusconi's tendency toward cosmetic gilding.
Without spending much time in the sun, the prime minister nonetheless manages to keep pastiness at bay.
He reliably looks either bronze or somewhat orange, depending on the moment and the lighting.
He also looks less short than he really is -- an estimated 1.67m tall -- thanks to special padding on his seats, sizable heels on his shoes and his aides' relentless patrol of the photographs taken of him.
Those aides regularly try to peel away some of Berlusconi's 67 years, often by having him travel back in time.
During his 2001 campaign for prime minister, for example, images of him on posters and in advertisements showed a younger, leaner man with a much fuller head of hair.
That was a matter not only of vanity, say his critics, but also of strategy.
He appeared to be trying to reassure Italian voters of his vim and vigor in light of news that he had battled prostate cancer.
His recent, nearly complete absence from public view since around Dec. 20 prompted speculation that he might again be ill, but aides and political allies have denied that.
Scapagnini's comments, as quoted in La Stampa, also seemed to have been prompted by a desire to quash that speculation.
Some of Berlusconi's political opponents privately floated the possibility that the doctor was operating in the realm of political spin and planting a fictive tidbit to divert Italians' attention from Berlusconi's numerous political woes.
But chatter about the prime minister's possible adventures in aggressive cosmetology preceded and transcended that tidbit.
It reached the point where another Italian newspaper simply took the surgery for granted and ran an interview with an expert on eye jobs.
That article, in Thursday's issue of the Milan-based daily Il Libero, talked about "a small surgical intervention" that had suddenly appeared "under the eyes of everyone, but mainly under the eyes of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi."
Whatever is happening, Berlusconi must indeed keep his eyes, altered or not, on an array of challenges, including June elections for the European Parliament that will test his and his party's appeal.
"He needs to look good," one associate said.
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