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Mara Carfagna
After having studied dance and piano, she participated in the Miss Italy contest in 1997, finishing in sixth place.About the experience she later said: "That competition makes you as a woman, it matures you...All that stress, that desire to win, it makes you understand who you are."
Later she started working in television, for the company Mediaset, owned by Silvio Berlusconi.
From 2000 to 2006 she participated as a showgirl in the television program La domenica del villaggio ("Sunday in the Village") with Davide Mengacci. In 2006 she led the program Piazza grande ("Main Square") together with Giancarlo Magalli.
Carfagna has also been part of the television programs I cervelloni, Vota la voce and Domenica In.
In January 2007, Carfagna was at the center of a controversy that received international attention. On the evening of the Telegatto award show, Berlusconi said about Carfagna that "If I was not already married I would have married her immediately".
The comment caused Berlusconi's wife, Veronica Lario, to demand an apology through a national newspaper, something which she also received.
Carfagna herself has later described the comment as "gallant and harmless," and said that she did not quite understand Lario's reaction.
The wiretap transcripts have not been published in any Italian newspaper, magazine or Internet site, but the Italian newspaper La Repubblica interviewed the ex vice-minister of Foreign Affairs in the Berlusconi II Cabinet and socialist executive Margherita Boniver, who admitted the existence of some messages.