ROME — Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales could learn a thing or two from the Italians when it comes to surviving political scandal.
How often is it that a government's top spokesman, a close ally of the prime minister, can be shown talking to a "presumed" transvestite prostitute -- and still hold on to his job?
Silvio Sircana, the spokesman, said he had no intention of resigning after newspapers this week published paparazzi photographs showing him in his car, apparently leaning over to address a person in hot pants and stilettos posed rather provocatively on the sidewalk.
The incident was a "moment of stupid curiosity," Sircana said.
"A man should not be crucified for the silliness of a single night," he told the newspaper La Repubblica. (He added that he did not pick up the prostitute.)
The photos of Sircana are part of a wider Italian imbroglio involving paparazzi, blackmail and celebrities from the worlds of sports, television and politics. Authorities this month broke up what they said was an extortion ring of photographers who specialized in the trafficking of compromising pictures.
The head of a photo agency was among a dozen people arrested.
As part of its crackdown, the government imposed new privacy regulations. Journalists can face up to two years in jail if they publish material deemed to be in violation of a subject's privacy and "not in the public's interest." Especially off-limits is intrusive information pertaining to what the new rules call the "sexual sphere" of a person's life.
Italy's journalists union quickly attacked the guidelines as vague and bordering on censorship.
The irony was lost on no one that paparazzi were being curtailed in the very country that gave them their name. It was Federico Fellini's classic 1960 movie "La Dolce Vita" that chronicled the exploits of a nuisance photographer, Paparazzo, as he stalked celebrities in a carefree Rome.
In issuing the new rules, the center-left government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi came under additional criticism because it appeared slow to act as the broader scandal developed, then clamped down only when rumors about the photos of Sircana began to surface.
Right-wing opponents accused Prodi of protecting his own -- "privacy for the powerful," as one put it. A few politicians on the left also were uneasy with the sequence of events.
