Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy: The definitive portrait of a godfather and his country

Can a non-fictional book be as interesting as a page-turner fictional plot?

Can it be at the same time a tycoon’s biography, a mafia tale, a gangster story, a political thriller, an essay on democracy, a dystopia, a sociological analysis of a nation, a scandalous sex story? If the subject matter is Silvio Berlusconi’s incredible story and Italy, the answer is yes.

This book, in fact, is a unique portrait of Italy’s godfather and also a detailed picture of Italian society. It is an attempt to explain to the foreign reader how an alleged mafia-linked business magnate and media tycoon, constantly in trouble with justice and drenched in vice, had the possibility to become the most popular political leader, Prime Minister and the absolute master of the country for at least twenty years, a period often referred to as a new ventennio.

The tone of this work is often satirical: the Italy that emerges is a double-sided nation because its well-known surface beauty – its monuments, its art, its creativity, its climate, its natural beauty, its fashion, its cuisine, the friendship of the people – hides an underlying Inferno made of disrespect of the law, of corruption, of mafia and bad politics liaisons.

I think that the erosion of democracy in Berlusconi’s ventennio represents a trend of modern capitalism, as predicted by several ‘dystopian’ writers to whom I have dedicated a chapter.