Letter from Rome: What have Italian government spokesman Silvio Sircana, footballer Francesco Totti and Barbara Berlusconi, daughter of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, all got in common?
The answer is easy since all three, in one way or another, have become embroiled in Vallettopoli, Italy's most recent "kiss-and-tell" scandal involving politicians, sports figures, actors, TV personalities and cynical paparazzi.
The alleged scam was simple enough. The paparazzo waited outside restaurants, bars and nightclubs until such time as a public figure emerged. If the public figure just happened to be accompanied by someone other than his wife or partner, then the paparazzo was in business. He had a "hot" item on his hands, an item he would later offer to the public figure in question, certain that the VIP would be only too happy to buy the pictures at an inflated price in order to prevent them being published.
At the moment, 33-year-old paparazzo Fabrizio Corona is in prison in Potenza, southern Italy, being held in preventive detention on charges of blackmail, extortion, drug trafficking and even favouring prostitution. The investigators allege that Corona, along with Lele Mora, a powerful and well-known talent scout, used "wannabe" stars as bait in a blackmailing scheme.
These same aspiring stars, many of whom adorn Italian TV talk and quiz programmes in which their main role appears to be that of appearing glamorous in a half-undressed way, are also known as showgirls or vallettes. Hence the scandal's media name - Vallettopoli.
While Vallettopoli was focusing on showbiz personalities and footballers, it prompted only a relative fuss. After all, this is Italy, the country which invented the figure of the paparazzo. Many felt that for those involved, especially TV personalities, the old Oscar Wilde principle applied: the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
Valletopoli, however, became a deadly serious business when it featured centre-left government spokesman Silvio Sircana.
In night-time photos which appeared in various dailies, and which reportedly were taken last September, Sircana is seen at the steering wheel of his Volkswagen Touran, apparently having stopped the car in order to "talk" to a "presumed" transvestite prostitute standing on the footpath in what looks like one of Rome's less salubrious areas.
The person on the footpath is lightly clad, wearing hot pants, high heels and little else and would seem to be intent on "doing business".
Aware these photos were doing the rounds of various newspaper offices, Mr Sircana suggested it might be better if they were published - which they were - to the indignation and annoyance of many politicians across the party divide.
Prime minister Romano Prodi issued a staunch defence of his spokesman, saying he had been the victim of an attack "that was unworthy of a serious country".
Opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi complained that Italy was "becoming barbaric", albeit ignoring the fact his family- owned daily, Il Giornale, had been among the first to report the pictures' existence.
Even many media commentators expressed their disapproval. Typical was this comment from Turin-based La Stampa: "Obviously, it's up to him [Sircana] to decide if he should or should not resign but, as far as we are concerned, he hasn't done anything all that serious. Like millions and millions of Italians, who become moral hypocrites during the day, he let himself be tempted by a night-time adventure of sex for payment."
The upshot of all this is that Mr Sircana is still at his post while the head of the privacy authority, Francesco Pizzetti, has imposed new privacy regulations to restrict the media from publishing private material regarding any individual's sex life, unless that material was "in the public interest" or constituted "essential information" in an ongoing investigation.
Former US president Bill Clinton, he of the Monica Lewinsky affair, can only look on and regret that he did not ply his political trade in Italy.
What would Clinton have made of Sircana's much-quoted defence?:
"You don't crucify a man for something as stupid as this. You don't expose someone to being pilloried by the media just because of a small and stupid change of route on a midsummer's evening."
As for Barbara Berlusconi, she issued a statement in which she denied having been blackmailed into paying a reported €20,000 for photos which caught her in an intimate moment with a man outside a nightclub. Rather, claimed Ms Berlusconi, she had "bought" the photos in question because they were "ugly".
Doubtless, too, she got them at a bargain price.
Totti and other footballers such as French international David Trezeguet have been less coy, admitting to investigators that they bought photos at exorbitant rates from Mr Corona in order to avoid their publication.
Valletopoli seems destined to run and run. More embarrassing revelations could be on the way.
Maybe the key to this very Italian scandal is to be found in the words of psychoanalyst Umberto Galimbert, who said recently: "Historically, Italians have been educated to develop a private ethic, not a public one."