Italians, often the butt of jokes about "opera buffa" politics and governments falling like leaves, got their sweet revenge yesterday as they gleefully poked fun at the American election fiasco.
"A Day as a Banana Republic" was the stinging headline chosen by the Rome daily newspaper, La Repubblica.
Italians are no strangers to post-election confusion, missing ballot boxes, trading votes like baseball cards, exit polls getting it wrong and dead people left on electoral lists. But they never expected it to happen in the United States.
"The first election of the new millennium has brought America into the realm of the surreal. . ., said La Repubblica.
Its banner headline "For a Fistful of Votes" - was a play on the title of Sergio Leone's spaghetti Western film A Fistful of Dollars, with Clint Eastwood.
"The inheritance Clinton left is a poisonous apple that Gore and Bush will have to bite into," La Repubblica said.
Italian editorials expressed shock. "Forty-eight hours after the vote, the most powerful nation on earth is not able to tell its citizens and the world who the 43rd president of the United States is," said Rome's Il Messaggero.
La Stampa of Turin ran on its front page a picture of a confused man in Chicago holding four editions of the same newspaper with four totally different headlines.
La Stampa said it was worrying to see a country like the United States "living in a sort of stunned suspension of time".
"The other night when I went into a restaurant in Santa Monica, there was one President - Clinton. When I ordered a pizza there was another one - Gore," wrote columnist Bepe Severgnini in Milan's Corriere della Sera.
"When I paid the bill there was a third president - Bush, and when I walked out on to Ocean Boulevard there was no president because Bill is now the husband of a senator from New York."
Severgnini added: "Today I am witnessing the spectacle of a hyper-technological America which is sitting on the ruins of its electoral system waiting for absentee ballots in the mail."
Italian radio stations spoke of the strange case of a "dead man elected", referring to the election in Missouri of late Governor Mel Carnahan to a Senate seat.
Alleged Florida irregularities offered the Italian media an opportunity to point fingers at yesterday's finger-pointers. "These shocking accusations have created an atmosphere of suspicion that is unusual for the `greatest democracy' in the world," said Corriere della Sera.