The lemon yellow palazzo, with its 145 rooms, enviable collection of Renaissance paintings and 10,000-volume library, was originally a monastery, before it was converted into a private residence and became the summer home of the aristocratic Giulini and Casati families.
The building was bought in exchange for shares, which were eventually valued at around £100,000. On completing the sale, Mr Berlusconi, now worth an estimated $6.2 billion (£3.85 billion), wasted no time in restoring the building to its historic grandeur. He even built a family mausoleum in the grounds – a pink granite sarcophagus, with his future resting place on a central plinth.
The 75-year-old used it as his personal retreat, relaxing with family and friends and inviting trusted world leaders such as Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin to stay, entertaining in the showpiece two-storey dining room. It was here that Mr Berlusconi recuperated after being smashed in the face with a statue of Milan’s Duomo by a mentally ill assailant. And it was here that, last week, he gathered his children and business advisers for crisis talks.
“There is nowhere more sacred to Berlusconi than the Villa San Martino,” wrote Italian daily newspaper La Stampa in February, when the palace was picketed by knicker-throwing protesters outraged at his womanising.
In the gatehouse of the neighbouring villa, which serves as the town hall, Arcore’s mayor told of her dismay at the town’s sullied name.
“As a woman, I was totally ashamed by him,” said Mrs Colombo. “Arcore is not about this – Italy is not about this.
“I am a liberal person, and think that women can do what they want in private. But when you represent the nation, you have a duty to behave in a respectable manner. You represent Italy. You represent me. And it is not acceptable.
“People in Arcore are angry – like everyone in Italy – because his promises fell apart. The economic situation is disastrous, factories and small shops in Arcore are forced to close, people are losing their jobs, and the government only spoke about bunga bunga and corruption. He had to go.”
In the streets of Arcore, the Berlusconi name is greeted with a weary rolling of the eyes.
In a café opposite the town hall, a young man read out the headlines about Berlusconi’s departure from politics, to the whoops and jeers of the patrons gathered around him.
“He is bad for Italy and bad for Arcore,” said Eleonora Catania, 16, a student bearing a strong resemblance to Noemi Letizia - the 18-year-old whose birthday party Mr Berlusconi attended, to the fury of his wife and their eventual divorce.
“No one trusts him,” added her friend Francesca Sala, 16. The girls look aghast when asked if they would vote for him.
At the pizza restaurant outside the gates of Villa San Martino, the manager Paolo Gattas, 35, laughs when asked if their celebrity neighbour ever popped in for a margherita.
“Berlusconi is history,” he said. “He has lost his focus, and doesn’t know where to look. We don’t like him here.” It is a feeling shared by Milan’s business community - an area which was once his bastion of support.
“He had pretty significant support in 1994, when he was first elected,” said Rodolfo De Benedetti, chief executive of the CIR group, one of Italy’s largest conglomerates with annual revenues of 4.8 billion.
“He was one of them, and told the story: 'Look how successful I am, and you’re going to benefit. The others are bureaucrats, they don’t know how to make money.’ “But the disappointment has been widespread.”
Mr De Benedetti, speaking to The Sunday Telegraph from America, added: “I’ve been coming here for 20 years and Italy used to be under the radar, irrelevant. Now it is being discussed on every TV station, every radio show, but for the wrong reasons.”
Italy’s business federations, insurance associations, small business representatives and main unions issued an open letter on Friday calling for a government to be in place by Monday, to show that the country was confronting their problems.
“We in Italy are used to being laughed at - in the 1970s Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine ran a famous front page picture saying we were just a nation of spaghetti and the Mafia,” said Arturo Artom, a venture capitalist and vice president of Milan’s entrepreneurial association.
“We smiled and thought it was like school children teasing you because they know you are the best - we are proud of our culture, design, heritage, food, industry.
“But in the last year it has got too much.”
Many of Italy’s political problems, he said. lay in Mr Berlusconi’s appointing of friends, rather than the best qualified people, to significant posts.
“I watch the debates in the British parliament, and - although I am sure you have your problems too - the discussion is informed. But in Italy, many our MPs have no idea about the economic issues, like the bond spreads.
“It’s a trust issue – and one that I hope, now, will be resolved.”
Italy, it seems clear, has tired of their mercurial leader. But will the people of Arcore be demanding he abandon their town too?
“He can stay here, we don’t bother about him,” said Mrs Colombo.
“But he better stay quiet. We’re fed up of talking about bunga bunga.”
But if he is expecting to be given a brave warrior’s welcome in Arcore, his stronghold 12 miles north of Milan, he is in for a nasty surprise.
“He is not one of us,” said Rosalba Colombo, the mayor of Arcore. “And when he resigns, I hope that our town will finally be associated with good things. Arcore is not Berlusconi.” But sadly for the 18,000 people of Arcore, it is a town which - in the world’s imagination – is the very soul of the fallen emperor.
The small industrial commuter hub became notorious as the scene of Mr Berlusconi’s infamous “bunga bunga” parties, which he hosted at his vast villa on the outskirts. The media tycoon said that the gatherings were merely “elegant dinner parties” – but the lurid tales of scantily-clad women competing for the attentions of a band of Mr Berlusconi’s aging cronies suggested otherwise.
Whatever the nature of the soirees, there is no denying that they were hosted in an exquisite setting.
Poised in acres of parkland on the banks of the river Lambro, the early 18th-century Villa San Martino was bought by Mr Berlusconi in 1974 – when he was a young, successful media magnate with the world at his fingertips.
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