He has been trailing in the opinion polls for two years and remains between three and five points behind his centre-left rival Romano Prodi. Yet there is one corner of Italy where they won't hear a word against him. Milano 2 is the vast luxury housing estate that first made Berlusconi famous as Italy's "king of bricks". With its ochre brown apartment blocks and terracotta mansard roofs surrounded by Scots pines, an ornamental lake and a fountain, tennis courts and football fields, kindergartens, a hotel and the headquarters of several of his most important companies, Milano 2 was a political statement as much as a construction project, "a city where there is everything, " as he put it, "from the clinic where one is born to the cemetery", for those able to afford it.

It was also reputedly financed by the Mafia, and was the occasion for one of Berlusconi's first political coups: by persuading Linate airport to change the direction of its flight paths to allow Milano 2's residents to sleep, he doubled the value of flats on the estate overnight.

Thirty years after its construction, the residents are still firmly behind Il Padrone.

"We're all Berlusconians here, " says Giorgio Antonaci, a bald figure in a black leather jacket and sunglasses with a striking resemblance to the old TV cop Kojak, knocking back a post-prandial Averno in the Empire Bar on the estate.

"The Berlusconi government has done many positive things, the opere grande [such as the projected bridge over the Messina Strait to Sicily], health and pension reform.

"I would give them seven-plus out of 10. I will continue to give him my support."

Antonacci is the owner of a firm that supplies hospital operating theatres around Europe.

Business is buoyant, he claims. Behind the bar, the Empire's owner, Luigi, has a different view.

"Look at all the shops around here vacant or for sale, " he points out. "Nobody's spending any money because their pay packets won't stretch to the end of the month.

"We're slipping back to the way things were 40 years ago, when a few people were rich and the rest of us were miserably poor. This is the way capitalism works, destroying the little man and rewarding the rich . . ."

Most commentators have been talking over recent weeks as if the results of the election to be held on 9 and 10 April were already in.

But many believe that the wildness of Berlusconi's recent behaviour . . . identifying the Communists in Prodi's coalition with alleged Maoist baby-boilers, storming out of a TV interview after being interrupted, lambasting fellowindustrialists . . . far from being signs of panic are conscious attempts to rouse the supporters who deserted him in 2004.

With Berlusconi, no one doubts that it will be a fight to the finish and in the past couple of days he has thrown his adversaries into angry confusion about their taxation plans.

"Berlusconi has always given his best, " notes Alexander Stille in a new biography, "when he has his back against the wall".