Rome Letter: This is a story of alleged computer hacking, flying mobile phones, hunger strikes and a late night TV chat with the prime minister.
The leading protagonists include Alessandra Mussolini, who just happens to be Sophia Loren's niece and the granddaughter of Il Duce himself, as well as Francesco Storace, president of the Lazio region, and, of course, prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
We are talking about Italy's forthcoming regional elections, due next weekend when 42 million Italians have the chance to vote in elections for 14 regional councils, 10 provincial councils and 965 town councils.
As evidenced by the climate of insults, accusations and judicial inquiries, these elections have engendered no small amount of heat, a heat that has everything to do with the fact that they will be the last major electoral test before Italy's next general election, almost certainly in the spring of next year.
To begin with the flying mobile phones - it was Alessandra Mussolini who threw a mobile phone at the wall in disgust last Friday after hearing that a regional court had rejected her appeal against disqualification from the elections because of alleged electoral fraud.
Mind you, the mobile was not her own, rather that of a colleague, and the wall she threw it at was not a brick one since she was standing in the camper-caravan where she had been staging a symbolic hunger strike right outside the regional court.
It has to be said, too, that Mussolini's hunger strike (now over) was somewhat Italian, too. She allowed herself three cappuccinos per day - hardly the Irish school of hunger striking, but we are in Italy, after all.
It must be added, too, that Mussolini subsequently won her legal battle when the council of state last week ruled that she can, after all, run in these elections.
Were the issues at stake not desperately serious, it might be easy to dismiss Mussolini and the regional elections as just more of the Byzantine opera buffo that is Italian politics.
The problems for Mussolini began when an electoral commission ruled that hundreds of signatures supporting her nomination as candidate for her own "Social Alternative" party in the region of Lazio (Rome) were bogus.
That was bad enough, but then further allegations emerged suggesting that these irregularities had come to light thanks to a bit of inspired computer hacking.
Mussolini argues that the false names on her list had been discovered after right-wing rivals had "hacked" into Rome municipal council's database.
Computer technician Mirko Maceri is under investigation in an inquiry ordered by interior minister Giuseppe Pisanu.
The point about Maceri is that until last week he worked for Laziomatica, a private consultancy firm that just happens to work for Lazio's regional government, which in turn, just happens to be led by centre-right president Francesco Storace, a close and bitter rival to Mussolini.
The Storace-Mussolini rivalry goes back a long way but surfaced dramatically two years ago when current foreign minister Gianfranco Fini, leader of the party they both belonged to, namely the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale, denounced her celebrated grandfather during a visit to Israel.
Subsequently, she founded her own splinter party, Social Alternative, a small party with hardline, ultra-right support that is certain to take votes from Storace.
In the meantime, Storace, perhaps worried by the prospect of an imminent defeat brought on by a split vote on the right, has been doing a bit of protesting himself.
Last weekend, he claimed that he was the victim of a "campaign of hate" and of a "moral lynching" in the wake of a story carried by left-wing paper, L'Unita, suggesting that his father had been an anti-Semitic, fascist thug.
The whole business, commented ex-prime minister Massimo D'Alema, is nothing more than a "Watergate alla carbonara". He, of course, knows all about regional elections, having staked his reputation and political fortune on a good showing at the last running of these elections in 2000.
As leader of the then centre-left government, D'Alema then felt obliged to resign after his coalition's resounding electoral defeat.
That precedent only serves to underline the importance of these elections, since that centre-left defeat was followed one year later by the general election victory of Berlusconi's centre-right coalition. Anxious not to follow down the same road, Prime Minister Berlusconi has steered clear of becoming directly and personally involved in these elections, worried by opinion polls which suggest that the centre-left could win as many as eight or nine of the 14 regions.
However, the urge to get out there and hustle is sometimes too strong for the prime minister. Thus it was that he has entered the fray on behalf of Storace.
More importantly, the current electoral climate may well have influenced the prime minister's infamous remarks two weeks ago regarding a possible withdrawal of Italian troops in Iraq, remarks that prompted concern in both Whitehall and Washington, but which would clearly have gone down well with Italian public opinion.
It is worth recalling that during that same appearance on the TV chat show Porta a Porta last week, Berlusconi also promised new tax cuts for next year as well as a 4.3 per cent pay rise for public service workers. Now, if that is not electioneering, then I'm Roberto Baggio.