The fantastic nineties have ended today”, says the editor Riccardo Cavallero with a certain nostalgia at the news of the death of Silvio Berlusconi. He joined the Cavaliere holding company, Fininvest, in 1990, a time when “any investment proposal in Italy passed through there.” “At the beginning I was in charge of buying and selling, I had to go see Tex Schramm, founder of the NFL, who wanted to launch an American football team in Europe and Berlusconi was going to buy it from him, there were Planet Hollywood restaurants and I found myself with Schwarzenegger and Stallone, I saw Don King for boxing television shows, Murdoch… And in those years we won the Oscar for Mediterranean ”, recalls Cavallero. In 1991 they also bought the large Italian publishing group Mondadori, owner of the Spanish Grijalbo, and Cavallero would end up heading Random House Mondadori, one of the main publishing groups in Spanish.
Relating Silvio Berlusconi to Nobel Prize winners in Literature, Hollywood Oscars –also that of The Great Beauty, by Paolo Sorrentino– or great theater figures, and not only with Tele 5 and the world of popular television or trash TV, is not obvious. . And yet, il Cavaliere undoubtedly had an impact on the cultural field in all senses, both economically and certainly in the social narrative of an era.
“For a publisher, having Berlusconi as a shareholder was not a problem. I was in Mondadori at various functions and I never had pressure to control what we did. In Spain we published Hobsbawm, Chomsky, who were not his line ”, Cavallero remarks about leftist thinkers. “He was a businessman and he knew that publishers have his line and you have to respect it. There were two different spaces, politics and the party. And when he bought Mondadori he did something never seen before: he sponsored Milan’s pocket collection, Oscar, for a year. It has never happened in world history. Not even José Manuel Lara did it”.
“It changed – he continues – the way of doing things. As a businessman, he always accelerated, he told me that books can be sold more than what they are selling, it was his attitude in any business. Mondadori, who was number one, took a long distance from number two, investing, buying important authors, and the mentality was to recruit people who did not come from the world of books to have a different vision.
He saw him three times a year, he worked more with his daughter Marina, but Cavallero remembers that above all il Cavaliere “was a great seducer, he had to seduce the person in front of him. And he got it, his historical enemies also say it. If you saw him live, you liked him ”.
A Berlusconi who, in his Fininvest empire, had the Manzoni theater in Milan, which he saved decades ago from being a shopping center, and film producers and distributors such as Silvio Berlusconi Communications and Medusa, who produced or co-produced films by Gabriele Salvatores such as Mediterráneo, La gran beauty of Sorrentino, but also of Bertolucci (The Sheltering Sky), Tornatore, Benigni or Lina Wertmüller. And lots of comedies. Berlusconi himself would be the subject of numerous films, from The Alligator by Nani Moretti, to Silvio (and the others) by Sorrentino, through Shooting Silvio or I have killed Berlusconi, based on the novel L’omicidio Berlusconi by Andrea Salieri.
The Italian playwright Davide Carnevali, who lives between Barcelona and Germany and who wrote Confession of a former president who led his country to the crisis –which Alberto San Juan set up in Spain– acknowledges that as a businessman “Berlusconi has not been an economic factor, nor it has created problems for editorial directors, nor has it given clear direction regarding cultural decisions.” But even so, he warns, Berlusconi’s influence has even reached his profession: “His television of him greatly influenced the eighties in Italy, marked a popular culture that also reached the theater. He allowed many theater actors to work on television and programs that carried the comic theater were born on it. And that has greatly influenced the way of writing of my generation, our concept of the comic is quite influenced by your television.
And then, he says, “the political Berlusconi arrives when my generation starts university. And again marked an era. When I left Italy, I also did so because I didn’t see a future in culture, and that surely came with the first Berlusconi governments, who proposed a vision of culture much more linked to marketing. In Italy the dream of getting rich goes through marketing and because everyone can get rich easily, like him. And that implies not having to cultivate. Culture costs fatigue. An exodus of people sought a life abroad, and the feeling came that Italy had destroyed culture”.
In this sense, he summarizes that “the fundamental factor of the Berlusconi era has been how he has embodied a desire and a collective dream explaining his story, a person who did not come from a bourgeois family and has succeeded, has built himself, the dream American. And this is indeed the most important legacy on a cultural level that Berlusconi has left behind. A legacy that is more American than Italian, the idea of ??giving the country a dream”.
Curiously, if Berlusconi was demonized a few years ago, Cavallero and Carnevali are concerned about his absence. “Somehow it contained, now I am afraid that Salvini and Meloni feel much more legitimized to open a new stage, Berlusconi still had this legacy somewhat democristiana, center-right”, says the author. “An era has ended, and at this moment in Italy I don’t know if this is good or if it is bad, seeing what is happening. He was a moderate, now there is a vacuum”, concludes the editor.
