The first day of the Group of Eight summit on Monday ended with fireworks in the fog.

That perhaps was a fitting metaphor for the leaders’ private talks on such murky issues as climate change and world economic woes.

After a group photo inside a luxury hotel that was the summit site, the leaders moseyed outside to watch a dance performance on the terrace. The leaders, toting umbrellas, were barely visible in the mist and haze blanketing the hotel.

Dressed in traditional costumes, scores of dancers waved silver fans and oars and banged drums on a rain-slick stage. Afterward, dancers with canisters of fireworks took the stage and unleashed a light show.

The fireworks shot out of the canisters like a stream of water from a firehose. The hot white sparks were extinguished the moment they hit the wet stage.

The fireworks handlers bowed to the leaders, but with the fog, now coupled with smoke from the fireworks, they looked like fuzzy dark outlines on the stage.

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You would have thought President Bush would have learned his lesson _ talking candidly in front of an open mike at a summit.

But he did it again at this year’s summit as he sat next to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at a session with African leaders.

Bush was overheard telling Berlusconi: “I read the courts are coming after you again?”

To that, the Italian leader _ who recently returned to power after being thrown out of office several years ago, in part for his support for Bush in the Iraq war _ responded, “Always.”

“It’s unbelievable. ... I’ve never seen anything like it. They’re constantly after you,” Bush said.

He also was overheard telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel that going biking at the lush, mountainside resort where the summit is being held was “fabulous.”

Bush had the same open mike problem two years ago at the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, when he was overheard expressing expletive-rich frustration to then British Prime Minister Tony Blair about the militant Islamic group Hezbollah and its backers in Syria.

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Eight years ago, Bush met then-Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time and famously declared, “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

Apparently there was no such insight Monday when Bush met with Putin’s hand-picked successor, Dimitry Medvedev.

“I’m not going to sit here and psychoanalyze the man, but I will tell you that he’s very comfortable, he’s confident, and that I believe that when he tells me something, he means it,” Bush said.

He said Medvedev was “a smart guy who understood the issues very well.”

Medvedev congratulated “George” on his 62nd birthday Sunday.

“Everybody has a birthday,” Bush replied.