Last week the seven-times Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, appeared to suffer a setback in his long battle to defend himself against charges of Mafia collusion. Two new witnesses, the Brusca brothers, Giovanni and Enzo, provided fresh testimony supporting prosecution allegations that Andreotti (78) was the Sicilian Mafia's main political protector for at least a 20-year period.
Four years ago state prosecutors in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, revealed that Andreotti was under investigation on charges of Mafia collusion and complicity in Mafia murder. In September 1995 he went on trial in Palermo and the following April he also went on trial in Perugia. Given the inefficiency of the Italian juridical system, both trials could last for anything from five to 10 years before arriving at a verdict, a reflection which has prompted Andreotti to say he fears he may well find himself facing God's judgment long before that of his fellow man.
Wearing two not exactly brand-new woolly cardigans, one over the other, Andreotti cuts a curiously inoffensive figure as he welcomes me into his Senator's office in Palazzo Giustiniani, right in the heart of tourist Rome. So, this is "Beelezebub" (as Italian media nickname him), the ultimate wheeler-dealer, the true descendant of Machiavelli, I think to myself.
These days, Andreotti says, his time is consumed by the Senate (where he is a member of the Foreign Affairs Commission), by writing (in January he published his 15th book), by reading, by editing the religious affairs magazine 30 Days - and, of course, by occasionally attending his trials. If there is a positive aspect to his fall from power, he says, it is that the pace of his life is now less hectic and his health correspondingly better.
Andreotti first entered public life in 1947 as under-secretary to the prime minister, Alcide De Gaspari.
"Without doubt the overall picture is much better now than 50 years ago," he reflects, "because there isn't the same threat of warfare, nuclear or otherwise. If you tell today's young people that the great achievement of the European Union has been to stop France and Germany going to war for the third time this century, they would laugh at you, but my generation understands these things differently."
Andreotti was Italian foreign minister six times and is widely credited with having shaped the broad outlines of Italian foreign policy, in particular in relation to the US, the EU and the Arab world. He has always argued that Italy, as a central Mediterranean country, should constantly seek interlocutors in the Middle East. In particular, he promoted dialgoue with Yassar Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) during the 1970s and '80s, something which did not always meet with US approval.
"The Arab world is once again important. Historically it was important for the sciences, for philosophy and for the arts and now it is important, or parts of it are important, for its oil . . . Italian foreign policy, mine and others, was simply to insist that the Palestinians and the Israelis must negotiate.
"Not everyone saw it that way. I remember that when Arafat came to Rome for an inter-parliamentary conference in 1982, not even our then prime minister, Giovanni Spadolini [a Republican, sympathetic to US interests] would receive him . . . At the time of the Algiers Declaration, when the PLO for the first time acknowledged Israel's right to exist, even then Arafat couldn't travel to New York to explain his position at the UN because for the Americans he was still considered a terrorist."
Andreotti compares attitudes then to Arafat with those today to the Libyan president, Moammar Gadafy.
"Obviously, Gadafy has things to answer for and he's certainly no Queen Victoria. I've met him often, he's a very difficult person, he makes the most terrible statements . . . but I am sure that he's not mad and I'm sure that you have to talk to him.
"If Gadafy were to fall, what sort of regime would you have in his place? There has to be a big risk of Islamic fundamentalists taking over Libya and that could mean starting a whole fundamentalist wave all the way across North Africa, through Tunisia and into Egypt."
Andreotti argues that the sometimes simplistic nature of US foreign policy, the tendency to depict leaders such as Gadafy or Syria's President Assad as hate figures, can be traced back to a basic flaw in the US political system.
"The American system works very well for domestic US politics - the system of state representation and the fact that every four years or at most every eight, the entire governing regime changes. That is all good and well, but now that the US has a dominant role on the world stage, the chance is that a newly-elected president will have little knowledge or interest in international affairs."
One country the Senator does not accuse of geographical or political naivety is Ireland. He says Ireland has been astute in the way it has handled its EU membership and in particular in its ability to maximise the benefits to be had from the regional funds. "The Irish politician I knew best was [Garret] FitzGerald. In meetings you could see that he was very well informed on European affairs and he always did a good job in looking after Ireland's interests and particular problems." He cites as an example the need to reconcile Ireland's traditional neutrality with the EU requirement for a common security policy.
"On top of that, though, he was a very likeable person and that human touch can be very useful at European Union meetings."
Switching to matters closer to home, and in particular to the continuing "revolution" in Italian politics, Andreotti argues that the downfall of an entire ruling regime and of his own Christian Democrat party was provoked not so much by the effect of the Tangentopoli corruption inquiries as by the fall of Eastern European communism. Italy's post-war politics until 1992, he concedes freely, were held in the vice-grip of a system governed by a Cold War logic, which meant that, whatever else happened, communists had to be kept out of office.
Today, of course, those same albeit much transformed social democratic communists form the main party (Democratic Left) in the centre-left government led by Romano Prodi.
Andreotti chuckles to himself: "In the overall shakedown, the communists managed to get by partly by changing their name and then by leaving part of their heritage to Rifondazione Communista. "However, Italy is changing. It has to change but what the new Italy will be, it is difficult to see."