Before jumping into the political arena, Silvio Berlusconi was already thinking about death. In 1990 he designed his own tomb in his mansion in Arcore, on the outskirts of Milan. There he commissioned the well-known sculptor Pietro Cascella to build a monumental mausoleum in Carrara marble inspired by the tomb of Tutankhamun or Emperor Hadrian. It had a central place for him, and thirty spaces for his closest collaborators, friends and family, whom he tempted with the honor of being buried in his own home. “Don’t do something mortuary to me”, he asked Cascella.
Three times Italian Prime Minister, television magnate, soccer magnate and protagonist of the most lurid scandals in Italy, Berlusconi died this Monday at the San Raffaele hospital in Milan due to chronic myelomonocytic leukemia that was diagnosed more than a year ago. according to the Italian news agency ANSA. He does so after several ins and outs of the hospital in recent years. His health was a source of concern since, in 2020, he was admitted to the hospital with coronavirus and bilateral pneumonia, although he was discharged a few days later. Since then he has repeatedly passed through the hospital. One of the last was in January 2022, due to a urinary tract infection. In April he was admitted for pneumonia aggravated by this leukemia, which was unknown until now, and after 45 days in hospital he was discharged, but just three weeks later he returned to the hospital this Friday where he finally ended up dying.
Born in 1936 into a middle-class family in Milan, Berlusconi’s first job was as an electrical appliance salesman to pay for his law studies. The gift of people that has accompanied him until the end of his days also earned him to embark on cruise ships and dedicate himself to singing and encouraging passengers. One of his first crazy ideas was, in the sixties, to build the unique Milano Due real estate project, a place where some 2,700 families still live on the outskirts of Milan with all the basic services and even an artificial lake with swans.
The neighborhood was the place that hosted the headquarters of the first Italian private television, TeleMilano 58, which began broadcasting in 1974. Through its network, Canale 5 arrived, the first national private television station, which led to a revolution in the small screen with the empire of Mediaset. With its private channels, it ended the monopoly of public television Rai, and later completed its business project by acquiring the Mondadori publishing group and the Milan AC soccer club, which it added to the Fininvest conglomerate. They say that one of the most painful moments in his life was when he had to give in and part with Milan in 2017. His new football toy would be Monza, a small team that managed to get promoted to Serie A.
Once successful in business, Berlusconi decided to launch into politics with the same advertising techniques that had filled his pockets. He broke into a convulsed Italy due to the Clean Hands process, a gigantic corruption scandal that ended the Christian Democracy and the order known in the media as the First Republic. He won the elections in 1994, and although his first term was brief, he repeated it between 2001 and 2006 and 2008 and 2011. His legal scandals and the bacchanalia he organized with underage girls – he preferred to call them elegant dinners – in his residences from Rome, Milan and Sardinia ended up in all the newspapers, but what sank his last term was the scourge of the economic crisis and the loss of confidence from his European partners. His governments were a democratic rarity (a powerful businessman and president at the same time) that were later imitated by other billionaires eager to try their luck in politics, starting with Donald Trump. He always amassing strong popularity data despite his accumulation of negative covers, brandishing liberal promises of tax cuts and fighting irregular immigration.
But Il Cavaliere never gave up. Not even disqualified for tax fraud, expelled from power by the pressure of the markets, investigated for his business or ridiculed for the bunga-bunga parties, he accepted to pass the baton to the new generations. In recent years he was still plotting political tricks so that his party, Forza Italia, would continue to be essential in the parliamentary arena. He was one of the first to support Mario Draghi’s path to solve the crossroads of the Italian recovery plan.
In October, he managed to return to the Senate nine years after being expelled for tax fraud and form the current government coalition that governs Italy, albeit reluctantly for being Giorgia Meloni, his former pupil, who leads it. It has put him in trouble until the last minute, because of the budget law, because of the distribution of positions or because of his incendiary statements blaming Volodimir Zelensky for the war in Ukraine and defending his old friend, Vladimir Putin, with whom he is I was going on vacation. He dies, however, without realizing the last of his dreams, to become President of the Republic. Also without designating a clear heir for the party, which in recent years has suffered significant casualties. One of the big questions now is whether Forza Italia will outlive its leader or if it will implode and its members will spread out among the various right-wing formations that exist. Salvini has been trying to unite this space for a long time. Many will opt for the Brothers of Italy, and others are already beginning to be tempted by the centrist space represented by Matteo Renzi and former minister Carlo Calenda.
His sentimental life was as famous as his professional life. He first married, at the age of 29, Carla Elvira Dall’Oglio, with whom he had Marina (1966, his favourite), today president of his Mondadori publishing group, and Pier Silvio (1968), vice president of the Mediaset family group. After the divorce, he married the actress Verónica Lario. They met when she was playing The Magnificent Cuckold, and they had three children, Barbara (1984), Eleonora (1986) and Luigi (1988). The subsequent divorce ended in a very long battle in the courts, which ended up determining that the ex-wife had to return some 60 million euros received. He then dated Francesca Pascale, 49 years his junior, for years, whom he compensated with 20 million euros after leaving him for an even younger woman, Marta Fascina, 33, a Forza Italia deputy. With her he starred in a notorious fictitious wedding, with a bride dressed in white and a wedding cake, but without any known legal validity due to the opposition of her children, concerned about her inheritance. In recent times Fascina has been the bridge between Arcore and the world.
Berlusconi, with a drive towards immortality manifested in his aesthetic operations, hair transplants or recurrent makeup, used to joke that thanks to medical advances he would live 120 years. His personal doctor, Alberto Zangrillo, also maintained that from the immunological point of view he was practically immortal. However, in recent years the crush of young far-right leaders such as Matteo Salvini or Giorgia Meloni showed how much he had aged at rallies. He had undergone open heart surgery and a pacemaker for years, the coronavirus affected him deeply and left him respiratory sequelae that have ended with an Italian symbol, inventor for many of populism in the European political laboratory.
