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Rock stars have a lot of money. They have a lot of sex with a lot of different women, each more gorgeous than the last. They have ex-wives, private jets and luxurious villas and know how to throw a party. Their every move – clothed or unclothed -- is captured by the paparazzi. They may be talented, or untalented uncouth rogues. Mostly they are famous for their famous lifestyles.

Using these parameters, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s aging billionaire playboy prime minister, is a rock star of the highest order, the king of the party goers, the baron of the bacchanal. Rolling Stone magazine thought the same. On Monday the mag’s Italian edition made him “Rockstar of the Year” for a lifestyle that makes Rod Steward, Brian Jones and Keith Richards look like “greenhorns.”

Carlo Antonelli, the magazine’s editor in chief, implied that Berlusconi was an easy choice: “The way Silvio behaves, on a daily basis, his vital energy, his inimitable lifestyle, granted him, especially this year, an incredible celebrity all over the world.”

To honour the occasion, Rolling Stone commissioned Shepard Fairey, designer of the famous Barack Obama “HOPE” posters, to create the Berlusconi cover. He is depicted with a cheesy, arrogant grin as he tears the Italian flag in half, an appropriate gesture for a politician who is seen more as a divider than a unifier.

Berlusconi may very well find the Rolling Stone cover flattering – this is man who courts publicity. But he faces more attention that he will not find flattering. The next dose will come from the book, to be released Tuesday, by Patrizia D’Addario, the call girl and former model who says she had sex with the prime minister and that she and other women were paid to attend his private parties. Her book is called “Prime minister, take your pleasure,” a title inspired by the line spoken by a prostitute to an aristocrat in the Fellini film “Amarcord.”

In the books, she says that she and other showgirls were taken to a salon in Mr. Berlusconi’s Roman apartment in Palazzo Grazioli. "I was watching the whole thing with curiosity and my first thought was that I’d found myself in a harem,” D’Addario wrote. “He was on the couch and all of us, twenty girls in all, were at his disposition … Having been an escort I thought I’d seen a few things, but his I’d never seen, twenty women for one man.”

Berlusconi’s affections for women who are not his wife has cost him is marriage. Accusing her husband of “frequenting minors” after he attended the 18th birthday party of an aspiring model in Naples, Veronica Lario sued for divorce.

Berlusconi faces unwanted publicity of the legal kind too. Last month Italy’s highest court overturned a law that had protected him from prosecution while he is in office. As a result, he faces two trials. In one, he is alleged to have paid a bribe to a British lawyer to withhold incriminating details of his business dealings. In the other, he is accused of tax fraud and false accounting related to his media companies (the Berlusconi family control's Italy's main commercial broadcaster, Mediaset). The prime minister denies the allegations. He cannot deny that, for many of the wrong reasons, he is one of the most famous politicians on the planet.