A 22-day Commedia Ends Senza Pizzazz

Do you want your Lira back?

22 days after the end of the election, and 12 days after the Italian Supreme Court certified that he in fact was not the winner of the election, Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister of Italy, resigned on Tuesday. Seeing one of Europe's most flamboyant, blooper-ridden politicans stage a lackluster exit was, to be perfectly honest, quite boring.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Berlusconi still claims to be the "moral winner" of the April 9-10 election, and yesterday he insisted that "the Italians will regret me leaving; we were the best government of the Republic's history. " But the bottom line is this: Italy's richest man has left the political stage senza gusto. But his return seems inevitable -- Italian bravado dies hard.