AP Photo

It's almost exactly a year since Silvio Berlusconi resigned as Italian prime minister, and on Wednesday he confirmed that he has no intention of standing for office in 2013. Many in Italy suggested then that the curtain had finally come down on the country's bizarre second republic. It was, they said, the end of an era in which a media mogul could turn elections into a personality cult. Now, the thinking went, we were entering the third republic.