It was like the episode in Succession when Logan Roy dies: The news arrived on everyone’s phones simultaneously. It interrupted business meetings and casual gatherings, and disrupted students taking exams and end-of-season play-off games. It arrives in our offices, in our homes, while we were waiting in the checkout line of the supermarket. “Berlusconi is dead.”
It was an arresting moment in everyone’s life, all over the country. Everyone’s first reaction was the same: Are you sure? Students living abroad called their parents to check: Is it true?
No one believed it was possible, world-builders just don’t die. Who saw him, who was with him? Who can confirm? The doctors. The hospital confirmed. Yes, Silvio Berlusconi is dead.
He was 86 years old. He was suffering from leukemia. He leaves behind a very large family, confidants and caregivers in enormous numbers, a substantial number of widows, five children, none of them equal to their father, with the possible exception of the firstborn, Marina, but she is a woman this our patriarchal and male-oriented nation.
He leaves behind a political party, Forza Italia [Come on Italy], a name that itself is an exhortation not to give up, which is now destined to vanish without him. He leaves a right-wing government he helped create, a country that deep down resembles him, and a left-wing now devoid of its main enemy.
He leaves behind an unparalleled business empire built from nothing: He was the son of a clerk and a housewife. In 2021 Forbes estimated his personal wealth at $7.3 billion.
Vladimir Putin was among the first to offer condolences: “I lost a friend.” But Berlusconi’s film company, Medusa, also produced two Italian Oscar winners from two of Italy’s great left-wing directors: Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, and Gabriele Salvatores’ Mediterraneo. So whose nemesis was he, exactly?
He was a four-time prime minister of Italy, running the country from 1994 to 2011 with three interruptions. The longest-serving prime minister in the history of the Italian Republic.
He was a defendant in more than 20 court cases, was convicted of tax fraud, and was consequently debarred as a senator. As soon as he could run for office again, in 2019, he was re-elected. Just a few months ago he ran for President of Italy and was very disappointed he did not win.
He often joked if he could, he would have run for Pope. But he didn’t have the qualifications. He first entered politics at 58 with a now-famous video in which he proclaimed: “Italy is the country I love.” He’d made a company great, he claimed and pledged to do the same for the country.
Over the next two decades, he transformed the history of Italy, and not only Italy. In the thirty years prior to entering politics, Berlusconi to changed TV, he changed cinema, soccer, and the rules of business itself. It all began with a small local TV station. With the help of the left, specifically the Socialist Party, he had a law written especially for him to allow him to compete with public, state-owned TV.
That was the beginning, in the late 1970s, of commercial TV, Italian style. It was game shows and half-naked women. It created a collective culture, a shared source of reference, that became the measure of all things. A culture of performance, of entertainment. Above all, of seduction. He wrote the script.
In 1986 Berlusconi bought AC Milan. Having a top-flight soccer team, and leading it to tremendous success [AC Milan won the European Cup in 1990] made Berlusconi enormously popular. Running a commercial TV network, and then, with Medusa, a film production company, gave him the ability to generate a world of images.
He’s even become a part of the language. There’s an adjective: berlusconism. A rare honor.
He was always very likable, he loved to sing Neapolitan songs and tell jokes — he’d begun his career working as an entertainer on cruise ships — and he loved his women. He showered them with money and honors in exchange for favors. He also brought them into politics, generating a template still in use today. Many of them were very young, some were the subject of scandals, a few of criminal trials.
He was an arch-Italian, a stereotype and the dream of any ordinary Italian who wanted to make it big. A great Italian songwriter, Giorgio Gaber, used to say: “I don’t fear Berlusconi in itself, I fear Berlusconi in myself.” He was a man who spoke not to the mind but to the gut. He was accused, and in some cases convicted, of crimes that go to the core of our people: Not paying taxes, making deals with criminals to get along, bribing the powerful, buying with money that which normally cannot be bought, including people.
They called him “the professor.” He had a degree in business law. He started by founding an advertising agency. He had received the honor of Knight of the Republic, then he had to give it back. He was unscrupulous, visionary, committed many misdemeanors, and certainly many serious crimes as well. He made a great many a lot of money and was the misfortune of as many or more.
And, of course, he made a fortune for himself. He understood where the world was going before almost anyone else did, and turned that vision into profit. He made the world into what he wanted it to be.
Everyone had to deal with him, everyone tried to eliminate him. He had an obsession with physical health, with appearance: Generations of doctors tended to his preservation. Some guaranteed he would live to be 120. He underwent painful procedures in the attempt.
His fable ended as it began: With a video. In his first, in the mid-1990s, he had all his hair and said he would make his country great. His country believed him. In his last, made a few weeks ago, the hair that was lost in the meantime had been implanted again. He said: I am still here, I am still your leader, you will have no one but me.
But he was very sick, visibly at the end. It was cruel, having him make what many people called a funereal video. It was, many people said, those rapacious women, those women who had always seduced him, him the Great Seducer, who in the end decided for him.
He had one final marriage, last year, but it was just pretense: A ceremony with no legal value. His five legitimate children, fearing an attack on his estate, made sure of that. But, as with Logan Roy, disposition and the drive, the hunger, for success is not something you can inherit. His unscrupulousness, his ability to remain in the saddle whatever happened. His cynicism, his insight. Berlusconi is dead and all of us: Friends and enemies, relatives and strangers, are left orphans.
There will be a TV series, not so soon but certainly soon. A Succession that will tell of the man who visited Putin in his dacha and had dinner with Trump. The man who invited political opponents and TV contestants to his villa, offering them more money if they would come over to his side. Not all went with him, but some did.
There will be a state funeral in the Milan cathedral, in his city. The old President of Italy, the one he wanted to be but was not, will pay tribute to him. It’s the end of a long era. The end of a seemingly endless TV series for which there can be no possible sequel. It ends here, to the sorrow and the relief o many. There will be another era, another script, yet to be written. This one is finished. Berlusconi is dead.
