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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Silvio Berlusconi is the Prime Minister of Italy, its first media mogul, and its richest citizen. Italians who like him--and obviously millions do--usually start with "rich." It's a word they pronounce with some reverence, because, for Berlusconi's admirers, having a leader who not only is spectacularly rich but, more to the point, came from nowhere, got rich before he got elected, and has managed to put the Italian state to work to guarantee his fortune amounts to a watershed in Italian history, something to command attention and respect, on the order of Dante or the Quattrocento. "The role of Berlusconi is to be rich--that's his job," the producer Carlo Freccero told me, about a year after he was replaced as the president of RAI-2, one of the country's three state television networks, for what could be called insufficient deference toward the Prime Minister.
Not everybody likes Silvio Berlusconi. He can be charming, courteous, and entertaining, but in his time he has been accused of many unpleasant things. Contempt for the law. Conflict of interest. Bribery. Money laundering. Plain corruption. Offhand displays of arrogance--Islam is an inferior civilization; Mussolini never killed anyone, just "sent people on holiday"--that in the retelling sound even more bizarre. Freccero says that if you love Silvio nothing about him matters but the dream of success that he's selling in his own person. And never mind if a dream called "Silvio Berlusconi" sells better in Italy than anywhere outside Italy, under the kind of scrutiny Berlusconi can't manage and the kind of ridicule he can't censor.
Berlusconi isn't simply the first mogul of the advertising and media age in Italy. He is the first to have grasped that whoever controlled its images of success could appropriate almost any amount of political power. Today, he monopolizes a huge share of the country's sources of information, which is also to say, its sources of manipulation. The list of media that he or his relatives or his proxies own, or directly or indirectly control, includes the state television networks and radio stations, three of Italy's four commercial television networks, two big publishing houses, two national newspapers, fifty magazines, the country's largest movie production-and-distribution company, and a chunk of its Internet services. That's more than fifty per cent of Italy's advertising market. Soon the list may be even longer, thanks to a draft law, now making committee rounds in parliament, that redefines the media to include a stockpot of new categories, from Web publications and publicity handouts to music and movies. If the law passes, Berlusconi's media holdings will fall well within a legal limit, and he will be able to purchase a couple of other newspapers that he apparently wants--Corriere della Sera being the most important and consequently the one he is said to covet. He has already done well by his close friend Rupert Murdoch; on July 31st, programming on nearly all the satellite hookups in Italy was switched automatically to Murdoch's Sky Italia.
Berlusconi's power over what other Italians see, read, buy, and, above all, think they think is overwhelming. And that's a fraction of his influence. At one time or another, the Prime Minister has laid siege to vast sectors of the Italian economy, among them debt financing, insurance, real estate, supermarkets, and sports. (The sports rundown, past and present, that Berlusconi gave me included not only AC Milan--one of Europe's most lucrative soccer teams and franchises--but also "a rugby team, a volleyball team, everything, in every sport, and I always won, everywhere, even ice hockey.") He is also the biggest employer in Italy. If you add the twenty-two thousand Italians he actually employs to those in the huge bureaucracies he directly or indirectly controls, you arrive at more than three million of the country's twenty-three million working people--and that's not counting the families of those people.
The state, in Italy, has never been independent of its politicians. Berlusconi didn't create the system. He inherited it, made it marginally less accountable than it was before, and lost it when his first coalition fell, in December of 1994, only eight months after he put it together. Given that no one then tried seriously to fix the system, it's not really surprising that, once he controlled it again--a couple of national elections, five governments, and six and a half years later--he felt free to make it worse. Ferruccio de Bortoli, who ran Corriere from 1997 until late last spring (when he came under such unnerving palace attack for his coverage of the Prime Minister that he was forced to resign), told me that, for him, the most significant difference between Italy when he took over the paper and Italy today, under Berlusconi, is that "the level of legality is lower now. We are the only country in Europe that suffers this anomaly." There are no blind trusts. No meaningful guidelines on conflict of interest. No culture of divestment. No legal reason for a Prime Minister even to consider divestment. "I wanted to do it," Berlusconi has said. "But my children won't let me."
Berlusconi was born in 1936, in an outlying Milan suburb, to a formidably dour mother called Rosella and a father, Luigi, who worked in a one-branch local bank that was later instrumental in getting the Prime Minister his first business loans. Berlusconi's 2001 campaign biography, "An Italian Story"--a hundred and twenty-eight pages of unremitting spin, mailed to every Italian family--follows Luigi's progress from bank clerk to general manager, gets him more or less honorably through the Second World War ("a horrendous tragedy that Silvio, and all his compatriots, have never been able to forget"), and turns Rosella into a heroine who, pregnant and alone, faces down the S.S. to save the life of a Jewish woman on a commuter train. Journalists who have tracked Berlusconi's financial history are often surprised to discover, in the end, how much of it is laid out proudly in the official literature. He began as a salesman. He made his first big money in the seventies, closing the development package for a four-thousand-unit office-hotel-and-apartment complex on an artificial lake outside Milan, which he'd been putting together for ten years and was modestly calling Milano 2. Within a few years, he was able to unload the central square of Milano 2--the commercial space, with the offices and the hotel. The money went to start his media empire: the advertising agency Publitalia, which is his linchpin company; Canale 5, his first national television station; and Il Giornale, his first newspaper.
In the official literature, this extraordinary rise is transformed into Silvio's vision of making the world safe and free for Rosella. She is his fallback Italian mamma. She comes up in almost every conversation with the men in his inner circle, a woman of such improbable homilies that she could be June Allyson in a fifties weepy. ("If you feel it's your duty to do it, you must find the courage to follow your ideal," she supposedly told Silvio when, at the age of fifty-seven, he sought her advice on going into politics. "Gather your courage, your energy, your enthusiasm, and your faith.")
If the cliche is true that Italy's most enduring institutions--the Mafia and the Church being the obvious examples--owe their success to the prototype of a big, bossy Italian family, full of threats and pieties, then you have to look at Italy today as Rosella Berlusconi's legacy. The Berlusconis are the national soap opera, better than anything you can find on Berlusconi's own networks. There is his first wife, Carla dall'Oglio, who lives in quiet retreat in London and is famous for having never uttered a word about the twenty years they spent together. There are the two grown children. Marina--at thirty-seven, a vice-chairman at Fininvest, Berlusconi's domestic holding company--is also known for having produced a baby with a dancer at La Scala, whom she is said to have met through his male lover, a celebrated plastic surgeon. Piersilvio--at thirty-four, a vice-chairman at Mediaset, Berlusconi's domestic media conglomerate--is known mainly by the parties he goes to and the TV hostess draped on his arm.
It goes without saying that neither of them gets along with Veronica Lario, the second Mrs. Berlusconi, whom Silvio married in 1990, when the youngest of their children (two girls and a boy) was two. Lario's real name is Miriam Bartolini. She was born in Romagna, became an actress, and worked hard to "give dignity" to her life, as Berlusconi would say. He first spotted her performing in a play that was once memorably described as a "topless classic." By now, she seems to have outgrown him. "Well, I mostly see him on television," she...
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