Benigni's canto on anything from Dante to Berlusconi

Roberto Benigni immediately broke the ice and had journalists in fits of laughter, unwilling to miss a single word, or gesture, at a press conference yesterday.

Notebooks and pens were put aside to watch the spectacle as the irrepressible actor never directly answered questions, veering off on a humorous but intelligent tangent that would almost invariably return to a question on what the question was.

Referring to the journalists by name, Mro Benigni took the Mickey out of everything, cracking up the floor. He babbled on, ten to the dozen (throwing in the odd Maltese word and even village name), claiming to have lost his train of thought - but never the attention of his audience.

The few instances in which he appeared serious inevitably turned into a joke, although there was a deep meaning hidden in everything he said.

The press conference, prior to the University's conferment of the honorary degree, was dominated by the eternity of the 14th-century poet and his La Divina Commedia, with interventions by the eminent international Dante scholar Robert Hollander. Mro Benigni's passion was expressed in the fact that he wanted to "jump on" Dante and "make love" to the book.

The actor/director spoke about the possibility - or impossibility - of making a comedy out of it, also with himself in the role of Dante. "I am the same age as he was in his last years of life. It could be entitled: The Last Days of Dante," he said, taking the credit for a "personal and original" idea that had just been proposed by Prof. Hollander.

Mro Benigni compared his reaction to the conferment of the honorary degree to the time when he was nominated for the Oscar for the movie Life Is Beautiful, but insisted that the latter was by no means the highlight of his life.

Asked where Dante would have placed him - in heaven, purgatory, or hell - he joked that he had never been asked such a question and could not answer, but would have expected to be asked where he would have put Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

"Hopefully, in the girone furthest away from me," he yelled - in hell, but at a great distance.

Mro Benigni is an outspoken critic of the newly-elected Prime Minister and media tycoon and did not hesitate to refer to him at the press conference, saying Malta had the Knights of the Order of St John but Italy only had one "cavaliere".

He said it would be extraordinary to shoot a film in Malta but went off on another colourful tangent before it could be understood whether he had serious intentions.

Acting out La Divina Commedia with the late Massimo Troisi, with whom he had starred in (1985), would have been a "spectacle par excellence", he said, adding that he really missed the actor, and breaking into a recitation of a canto as it would have sounded had the two been performing it.

Mro Benigni has embarked on a quest to bring Dante, and poetry, to people through his immense popularity, but he insisted his was by no means a "mission" to "culturise" the man in the street and that he was simply doing what he loved.