It has not been even two weeks since he passed away, but in Italy the race to commemorate the former prime minister and businessman Silvio Berlusconi has already begun by putting his name in different emblematic places.
The precocity record has been broken by the municipality of Apricena, with 12,000 inhabitants, in the southern region of Apulia, where they have already decided to dedicate a street to it if the government delegate gives permission to bypass the prohibition of waiting ten years after the death of a personality to hang a plaque. The Lombardy region has also been fast, governed by a right-wing administration, which has approved in a meeting to baptize the viewpoint on the 39th floor of the skyscraper that houses the regional government offices with its name, from where you can have one of the best views from the city of Milan.
But they could be minor projects compared to other ideas that have been launched in the last few days. Beginning with the proposal of the ex-mayor of Milan Gabriele Albertini to call Milan’s Linate airport Silvio Berlusconi airport, following the example of New York’s JFK. “It seems like a nice idea to me, there is no need to wait ten years. Transfer from Linate Airport to Silvio Berlusconi. Look at what has happened in New York”, Albertini said.
The idea has been well received in the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, guided by the leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, an ally for years of the Cavaliere. Ministerial sources have communicated that the proposal has been received with “great interest” and that they will be in charge of studying it and listening to the will of the family. On the other hand, for the current mayor, Giuseppe Sala, it is something crazy. “It is another opportunity to divide, not unite. I think that Milan has already shown with Berlusconi’s funerals an attitude of participation and sobriety”, said Sala, referring to the state funeral held on Wednesday of last week in the cathedral of the Italian city. The Milanese mayor has already made it clear that he is not going to ask for exceptions to shorten the deadlines to dedicate a street to the businessman. His party had chosen Volturno street, where Berlusconi grew up with his family.
Another former right-wing politician, former Lombardy president Roberto Formigoni, argues it would be much better to name Milan’s more modern Malpensa airport after the tycoon. “Berlusconi and I did it,” he argued, “he as prime minister and I as regional president, so it was his airport as well as mine.”
The other great Italian public work that could bear the name of the founder of Forza Italia is an infrastructure that he dreamed of for years. The Government of Giorgia Meloni has revived the construction of a bridge connecting Calabria and Sicily in the Strait of Messina, a pharaonic engineering work that Italy has been thinking about for decades, and in fact Berlusconi already in the 2001 electoral campaign promised that the bridge would be finished in ten years. Now, the Italian Executive wants its construction to begin next summer, and the Italian Undersecretary for Relations with Parliament, Matilde Siracusano, believes that the future viaduct should bear her name. “It was a great intuition of his and it would already be a reality if he had not been boycotted by the left, which always saw him as Berlusconi’s bridge,” she said in an interview on the La7 channel.
Berlusconi could soon also be the name of a stadium for an Italian Serie A club. As happened in Naples after the death of Argentine star Diego Armando Maradona, in Monza they want the stadium of this small club that the former premier bought in in 2018 and brought it to the Italian first division for the first time, it is known from now on under the last name of its last president. But it could go further, because the former Milan defender Filippo Galli has proposed that the new stadium of the Rossoneri club, when it is built and the Giuseppe Meazza is abandoned, bear the name of the president who led the club for more than 30 years and took advantage of its success. -with him they went from bankruptcy to winning five Champions Leagues- as a political platform.
