Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy

Finalist of the international literary prize “The Write Stuff” at the London Book Fair 2015

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, an attempt to let the foreign reader understand how it has been possible for a mafia-linked business magnate and media tycoon, constantly in trouble with justice and drenched in vice, to become the most popular political leader, Prime Minister and the absolute master of the country for the last twenty years.

It is evident that Berlusconi is the personification of corruption, of disrespect for the law, of the liaison organized crime – politics, of immoral behaviour, typical features of the ‘immoral majority’ of the country. Still, there are many open questions that this book tries to answer:

• How come Berlusconi grabbed complete control of all Italian information and used it as a Weapon of Mass Deception that turned viewers into faithful voters?
• How was he able to pass laws ad-personam that made him almost untouchable by the Judicial Power and favoured his business and financial activities in an unfair game?
• Can we say that Berlusconi is the very symbol of a concentration of political, economic and media power in one single person never seen before, a fact that has created the greatest conflicts of interests in the Western World, or is he just another pawn in a bigger game?
• What is hidden under Italy’s well-known surface beauty, artistry and creativity? Does Dante’s underworld Inferno still exist today?