Berlusconi grabs Italy’s attention, even in death

Not even death could take Silvio Berlusconi off center stage.

The post-Berlusconi era was inevitable, but it came with a shock on Tuesday, given the leader’s aura of plastic parts immortality — and his own energetic insistence, well into his 80s, that he was as young as ever.

And Mr. Berlusconi, who towered over Italian politics for decades as prime minister and power broker, still dominated the country a day after his death on Monday at the age of 86. Mourners brought flowers to his palatial villa. His critics debated whether he had transformed Italy for good or for worse. His most ardent admirers declared that he was first in their thoughts and prayers.

“He was a man of great intuition and the courage to follow that intuition,” Deborah Bergamini, a legislator from Forza Italia, Mr Berlusconi’s party, said in an interview on national broadcaster RAI. “I think this was his greatest charisma.”

Although Mr Berlusconi’s family decided to hold a strictly private gathering for relatives and friends on Tuesday, the former leader’s appeal brought cameras from news outlets and websites to the elegant iron gates surrounding his villa in Arcore, near Milan. Mr Berlusconi was taken to the villa, where he had lived since the 1970s, a few hours after his death at the San Raffaele Hospital in his hometown of Milan.

Outside the gates, a makeshift memorial of flowers, handwritten signs, and scarves and jerseys from football teams – AC Milan and AC Monza, the teams he owned before and at the time of his death – grew with the passing of the hours. Occasional rain did not prevent his supporters from gathering along the road to the villa.

Television — an industry Berlusconi had helped revolutionize through his media empire — broadcast countless hours of his reminiscing about his life and death.

Specials on Mr Berlusconi’s own channels supplanted regular programming. Afternoon talk shows discussed his oversized influence on Italian life and his political legacy, not always in flattering terms.

Recalling Berlusconi’s “infinite vitality”, Pier Luigi Bersani, the former leader of Italy’s main centre-left party, said on Tuesday that his former opponent had “reshaped politics”.

“It may have been debatable, but there’s no doubt it was new,” he said in an interview on a major national news program.

Some anchors on the Mediaset television channels owned by Mr Berlusconi wore black.

Details of Berlusconi’s state funeral, due to take place on Wednesday afternoon, were handed out throughout the day alongside television footage in front of Milan’s Gothic cathedral, where the ceremony will take place. Authorities declared Wednesday a national day of mourning, with flags flown at half-mast from public buildings, though clashes erupted in some places where officials said they would not join in the mourning.

According to the law“Former prime ministers can have a state funeral, but the decision to hold a day of national mourning was made by the government. It was a choice that some, such as Rosy Bindi, a former minister and leader of the Democratic Party, said was “inconvenient” given the “divisive person” Berlusconi had been.

Tomaso Montanari, the rector of the University for Foreigners of Siena, said in a letter to the university community that the institution would not participate in the national mourning for a man who may have made history, but “left the world and Italy far worse than how he found it.” The decision was immediately denounced by Mr Berlusconi’s supporters, but one online petition Mr. Montanari’s support received more than 17,000 signatures in just a few hours.

The headlines on the front pages of national newspapers showed how Italians viewed Berlusconi over the past three decades. La Gazzetta dello Sport called him the ‘Man of the Stars’, a reference to his long winning streak as owner of AC Milan.

“The first populist,” said the leftist La Repubblica, a nod to Berlusconi’s break with traditional Italian politics in the 1990s, when he laid the foundations for his own electoral popularity.

“He had sought immortality in every gesture of life and especially in the cult of himself,” wrote Ezio Mauro, who, as editor of the newspaper in the 1990s and 2000s, regularly criticized Mr Berlusconi. “Instead, Silvio Berlusconi also had to surrender.”

Corriere della Sera opted for a more solemn headline, “Italy without Berlusconi”, with one of the main columnists, Massimo Gramellini, musing on the front page: “It’s hard to imagine life without Silvio.”

Another columnist, Aldo Cazzullo, wrote that Berlusconi had “seduced a country” and had the ability to “make the majority of Italians identify with him.” Mr. Berlusconi, he said, “was immensely rich and he won the votes of the poor.”

Other newspapers devoted dozens of pages to the life and legacy of Mr. Berlusconi. The right-wing daily Il Giornale, until recently owned by the brother of the former leader, Paolo Berlusconi, filled the entire newspaper with articles and tributes written by family, friends and show business personalities who owed their careers to Mr Berlusconi and its television channels.

A banner on a network tower in Cologno Monzese, Mediaset’s headquarters, read “Ciao Papà” (Hello Dad) and “Grazie Silvio” (Thanks, Silvio), and a huge billboard on a nearby building read: “All of Mediaset embraces with love and infinite gratitude to its founder Silvio Berlusconi.”

The tribute extended beyond his hometown and the many Italians with a personal or professional investment in Mr Berlusconi.

In Naples, where craftsmen make modern terracotta figures to populate traditional nativity scenes, a shop collected figures of Mr. Berlusconi that he made over the years, with a sign reading: “Ciao Silvio.”