Are Italians taking over the world? Fabio Capello has taken charge of the England football team, the Italian-by-descent Rudy Giuliani is stirring up Republican politics, and now the supermodel-turned-pop star Carla Bruni is stepping out with President Sarkozy of France. Not since the Medicis have there been so many Italians in such high places.

Bruni and Sarkozy chose a bizarre venue to make their relationship public: Disneyland Paris, where they were snapped at the weekend watching the Mickey Mouse parade. This week the French media is gushing with gossip about the pair: Paris Match and Point de Vuehave both put Bruni on the cover, the latter with the line “La dame de coeur du Président”.

Bruni will surely take it in her leggy stride. After all, she has been “romantically linked” to Donald Trump and Eric Clapton, and survived a headline affair with Mick Jagger when he was married to Jerry Hall.

Born into a wealthy family in 1967, Bruni was seven when they fled to Paris to escape the threat of the terrorist Red Brigades. She grew up with music – her father was a composer, her mother a concert pianist – and played piano and violin before ditching them for the guitar. At 19 she left art college, having been picked up by a modelling agency. Bruni has described modelling as a “ parenthèse” (a digression), but her career took in 12 years of planes, parties and cat-walks and generated enough cash to put her up there at that time with Cindy Crawford in Business Age’s Top 20 supermodel rich list.

In 2000, two years after retiring from modelling, she hooked up with a young French philosopher, Raphaël Enthoven. The quiet life beckoned until Enthoven’s former wife, Justine Lévy (the daughter of the philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy) wrote a thinly-veiled novel, Rien de Grave (Nothing Serious), in which Carla had been “reimagined” as Paula, a plastic-coated model-turned-rock star who steals the protagonist’s husband.

The gossip mill ground on, but by then Bruni had other things to think about: a son with Enthoven and a pop career. A folky debut album, Quelqu’un m’a dit, was released in 2003 and sold 1.2 million copies. Earlier this year she produced a more ambitious but less successful album of adaptations of poems by Yeats, Auden, Emily Dickinson and others, sung in a smoky, quivering English accent. Full of literary zeal, she spent days studying verse, with Marianne Faithfull an unlikely tutor.

Bruni has described herself as “manipulative” and “fiery”, but says that her reputation as a “strategist” is wrong. “I never felt fame or power was important when you are in love.” Sarkozy, who announced the end of his marriage in October, appeared without his wedding ring for the first time this week. It seems that the President and Bruni are together – if not for life – then at least for Christmas. TOM GATTI

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