Dogged by a messy public divorce and reports of cavorting with underage girls and female escorts, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's image has a lot riding on the outcome of the G8 summit in L'Aquila.

The results have been mixed for Mr Berlusconi, but for the most part he seems to have won his bid to use the summit to take the spotlight off his private woes, at least for a few days.

Predictions that the hastily-planned summit would have been as much as a disaster as the earthquake that hit the area in April failed to materialise.

Before the summit, a New York Times editorial accused Italy of "inexcusably lax planning" and said Mr Berlusconi had shown more showmanship than leadership. Britain's Guardian newspaper went as far as saying some nations wanted Italy expelled from the G8.

Mr Berlusconi and his aides fought the foreign press - something they have perfected to an art form - by playing the national pride card.

He called the Guardian report, which said Washington secretly took over the event's planning, "a load of rubbish by a small newspaper".

"There are only two types of reality - that of the common people and that which newspapers sometimes write, but that is not reality but pure fantasy," he told a news conference.

There were some disgruntled delegates.

"Mr Berlusconi keeps changing things," one member of a European delegation said. "It is a logistical nightmare. He seems more bothered with showing off and looking at stupid statues."

But in the world according to Mr Berlusconi, where a favourable television image is worth a thousand critical newspaper articles, he seems to have had the last laugh.

He was all over the evening news broadcasts sombrely escorting the world's most powerful leaders one by one through the ruins of the earthquake-hit town.

Then he touted himself as a "miracle-worker" for pulling the whole thing off in a mere 10 weeks after he decided to move the venue of the summit to the city.

He also reminded Italians that he convinced the leaders that sober times called for sober summits, that sleeping in an austere police academy instead of a castle or a plush hotel would go down well with people back home.

Also, the big anti-global demonstrations that marred past G8s were nowhere to be seen.

Mr Berlusconi tried hard to avoid repeat performances of the gaffes to which he has been so prone in the past - something which won him a spot on this week's cover of the French weekly L'Express as the Buffoon of Europe.

But on the down side, Mr Berlusconi had to grin and bear it after President Barack Obama paid a courtesy call on President Giorgio Napolitano and praised him as a man of "great integrity".

Since there is little love lost between Mr Napolitano and Mr Berlusconi, some among the anti-Berlusconi camp in the Italian media were quick to interpret Mr Obama's choice of words as an indirect criticism of Mr Berlusconi's lifestyle.

Mr Berlusconi was also surely annoyed to find one of his most vehement critics had taken out a full-page advertisement in English on Thursday in the International Herald Tribune - a newspaper most delegates read.

Magistrate-turned-politician Antonio Di Pietro said Mr Berlusconi's passage of a law protecting him from prosecution was unconstitutional and appealed to leaders "to prevent our democracy in Italy being turned into a de facto dictatorship".