Rome has had its fair share of triumphant parades by bizarre tyrants in its long history.
And the ageing Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's arrival on Monday ranked alongside any grotesque ceremony staged by Caligula or Nero.
It is easy to see why Italy's Left-wing opposition denounced the dictator's reception by Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi as a 'rock star welcome'.
When Muammar Gaddafi arrived in Italy on Wednesday with 300 delegates and 40 female bodyguards aboard three planes, he was accorded a royal welcome befitting the "king of kings of Africa."
Gaddafi's arrived in Rome with a 300-strong retinue on three Airbuses. As ever, he brought with him a giant Bedouin tent, which was erected in a park in the centre of the city and where he was to stay and conduct business.
There was no immediate sign of the camel he took on a visit to Paris in 2007 when he pitched his tent in the grounds of a five-star hotel.
With gelled and carefully dyed hair, the Colonel was made up to look like a cross between Michael Jackson and the deranged music mogul murderer Phil Spector.
Pinned to his chest was a large photograph of a Libyan resistance leader being hanged by Italian colonialists in 1931.
Although with his peaked cap, red flashes, gold braid epaulettes and an array of military decorations that resembled a Dulux colour chart, he turned out in a uniform that Italy's last tyrant, fascist leader Benito Mussolini, would have killed for.
Bizarre: Gaddafi set the tone from the word go when he flew in adorned wearing a black and white picture depicting Libyan anti-colonial hero Omar Al-Mukhtar, whom the Italians executed in 1931. If Gaddafi wanted to remind his hosts of their repressive colonial past - Italy ruled Libya from 1911 to 1943 - then the picture of Omar al-Mukhtar in chains alongside his Italian captors was a particularly provocative way of doing it.
He did not help matters in an overwhelmingly Catholic country when he remarked: "For us, that image [of Al-Mukhtar] is like the cross some of you wear," likening it to the Christian crucifix
And just for good measure, Gaddafi brought along Al-Mukhtar's son, now an elderly man, who had to be helped off the plane by aides and who later sat in a wheelchair on the tarmac while national anthems were played.
The Italians even went further to allow the broadcasting on Italian TV, for the first time ever, of a documentary on Al-Mukhtar titled Lion of the Desert.
But it was the gun-toting female bodyguards in their khaki uniforms and red berets in the 67-year old dictator's entourage, girls who wear Kalashnikovs like Gucci fashion accessories, who stole the show.
Gaddafi is one of the maddest dictators on Earth and he doesn't like being upstaged - unless it's by this 40-strong troupe of well-equipped, allvirgin minders.
He may have conducted his 1969 military coup against Lybia's last monarch, King Idris, under an Islamic revolutionary banner. He may have proclaimed himself a pioneer of 'Islamic socialism'. But Gaddafi's female security detail don't hide their charms under a burqa.
Bizarrely, he claims them to be a symbol of his belief in female emancipation. 'Women should be trained for combat, so that they do not become easy prey for their enemies,' he says.
All of his girls are said to swear an oath that they will give their lives for him and it is claimed they never leave his side, night or day, and he insists they remain virgins. There is no shortage of volunteers for what is seen as a prestigious job.
A special training college puts recruits through a tough physical programme and girls who don't drop out emerge as trained killers, experts in firearms and martial arts.
Gaddafi makes the final selection and, despite his insistence that his guards are chaste, rumours abound that he demands their sexual favours.
The girls wear lipstick, jewellery, polished nails, even high heels - but their armed combat training has been tested more than once.
Prestigious job: Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's 'all-female, all-virgin' bodyguards who must wear lipstick, nail varnish and be masters of combat and who some say he demands their sexual favours
In 1998 one of them was killed and seven others wounded when Islamic fundamentalists in Libya ambushed the Colonel's motorcade. The dead girl, Aisha, rumoured to be his favourite, threw herself across Gaddafi's body to stop the bullets.
But how is it that Gaddafi, once regarded by the West as the father of terrorism and the man behind the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, is now welcomed in Rome with open arms by Berlusconi - a leader famously equally bewitched by female charms?
The truth is that, despite his often ludicrous appearance and behaviour, Gaddafi is one of the great survivors, a despot who has led his country for 40 years despite worldwide vilification - brutal in crushing domestic dissent and who changes his tune on the world stage as it suits him.
Like other monstrous leaders, he has written works of literature to enlighten mankind - his Green Book which, over three rambling volumes, sets out his views on political and social theories.
But another offering - Escape To Hell And Other Stories - predicts a German Fourth Reich lording it over Britain and America, and which tells you of his loathing for cities, Margaret Thatcher and humidity. (He loves the countryside and artichokes.)
When he seized power in 1969 under a Marxist banner, few thought his regime would last. But he had a ruthless cunning and an instinct for when to strike his rivals.
In the 1970s, Gaddafi personally ordered public executions. In 1977, he was present at hangings of students who had protested against his regime.
He spat defiance against the West, proclaiming his belief in Arab nationalism - yet he loathed Islamic fundamentalism. So while he happily tortured fundamentalists at home, he became the No 1 state sponsor of terrorism against the West.
In 1980, a Libyan journalist from the BBC's Arabic Service, Mohammed Ramadan, was shot outside the Regent's Park mosque.
It was four years later that Britain and the world was stunned with horror by the cold-blooded murder of unarmed WPC Yvonne Fletcher in London, gunned down outside Libya's Embassy by a member of its staff.
Gaddafi's oil wealth funded the IRA as well as Palestinian guerillas. This was one reason why Margaret Thatcher's government gave permission for U.S. bombers to use British airfields in April, 1986, to launch a surprise attack on his home in Tripoli.
They missed Gaddafi but killed his infant daughter, Hannah. Gaddafi has always been able to parade this loss as proof that he is a victim of 'U.S. terrorism' .
But despite sounding defiant, that U.S. raid marked a shift in Gaddafi's behaviour. Although he remained vocally as radical as ever, he began to drop support for foreign terrorists - although, as the downing of Pan-Am flight 303 over Lockerbie with the loss of 270 lives in showed, Gaddafi's secret service could still be deadly.
Now Gaddafi has put up billions of dollars in compensation for the relatives of his victims.
But it is his loathing of Muslim fundamentalists that has brought him into alliance with the West.
After all, back in the 1970s, Gadaffi was hanging members of the fundamentalist Hizb-ut Tahrir organisation, since banned in many European countries. So he had no difficulty backing the Bush-Blair war against Al Qaeda types threatening his regime.
Ever since, relations have thawed. In 2004, Tony Blair lifted lifted the West's fatwa on him for sponsoring outrages.
Then, as oil prices soared after the George W Bush's invasion of Iraq, Gaddafi's untold billions of energy reserves in the Libyan desert gave his regime an ace card.
Years of UN sanctions for his regime's sponsorship of terrorism mean that Gaddafi's oil and gas had not been exploited nearly as much as other Mid-East states.
Libya's old colonial master, Italy, sits across the Mediterranean without any energy resources of its own. Which is why Silvio Berlusconi has been more than happy to deal with Gaddafi.
Anyone thinking that Colonel Gaddafi is becoming a cosy ally should think again. Only a few weeks ago, Gaddafi stormed out of an Arab League conference, calling the King of Saudi Arabia a 'liar' and a 'British product and American ally'. Gaddafi remains mercurial, menacing and murderous.
Getting wobbly on his pins and wearing almost more makeup and hair dye than his 40 virgin bodyguards put together, Colonel Gaddafi looks set to carry on wrong-footing friend and foe alike. Mellow with age he won't.
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