"Politics, finance, these are things I don't understand, " Anthony tells Don Lucchesi.

"You understand guns, " he replies. "Finance is a gun.

Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger."

As theories of political economy go, it's not exactly Michael Oakeshott or John Rawls, but it's not half bad.

But the character of articulate, Armani-clad, urbane Don Lucchesi resembles what many of us would have supposed - thanks to the combined imaginings of Coppola and Mario Puzo - the Sicilian cosa nostra had evolved into.

So it was a shock this week to discover that the real head of the Corleone crime family, the "boss of bosses" turned out to look more like a peasant goatherd than a man who controlled a criminal empire spanning four continents. Short, stooped, silver-haired Bernardo Provenzano was caught by Italian police last week after a remarkable 43 years on the run, during which he's alleged to have killed more than 100 people.

Fifty of them by his own hand - strangulation was his preferred method.

He had been living in Corleone, the very real village at the sunbaked heart of Sicily, in a cottage that made Denis Donaldson's look like a luxury villa. No limousines or laptops for this don - mostly handwritten communications sent via personal ?postmen' to issue the orders that ran what some estimates say is a �?�36bn enterprise covering narcotics, human trafficking, protection rackets and a host of other evils.

Puzo couldn't have been more wrong about the boss of bosses. In fact, if there was a man in Italy who looked anything like the powersoaked Lucchesi, it's prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

When Berlusconi first burst onto the political scene in 1994 and later led his Forza Italia (Go Italy! ) party into power, many hoped that the country's richest man - who ran perhaps a majority of the country's media, and perhaps more importantly football club AC Milan - would get Italy moving again after decades of drift and endless squabbles. Atrocious governance and criminal economic mischief were leading to sclerosis of the country's industrial dynamism.

But instead, Italians got a leader who was a far cry from a Thatcher or Reagan, pushing through economic reforms that, while at first unpopular, unleashed torrents of entrepreneurial energy. Or even a Bill Clinton - whose single greatest achievement was to do as little as possible while the US economy rose to the challenges of globalisation.

It's the latter challenge that most of continental Europe has failed to face, preferring instead to buy off opponents of reform, wallow in past glories and imagine that the world, or at least India and China, owes them a living.

Instead, as he desperately tries to cling to power after left-wing challenger Romano Prodi seemingly bested him by the thinnest of margins last Sunday (some 25,000 votes out of 38 million cast), Berlusconi has sealed his place in history as a jumpedup kleptocrat who would have been at home running a 1970s Latin American dictatorship. He had his chance to pull the trigger and change Italy for the better, but he squandered it on his own venality.

It just goes to show that proper villains aren't generally so obvious.

The long-suffering people of Corleone declared 11 April their day of Liberation from Provenzano. The town council even christened a street 11 April to mark the occasion.

The rest of Italy could have to endure a full month of farce as the vagaries of Italian politics work themselves out, as Berlusconi seems unable to accept his loss at the polls.

But when he's gone there won't be much celebrating.

Just an awful lot of decidedly uncinematic hard work to be done, and not very much will to do it.