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In our culture, death seems to erase all unpleasant aspects of a person: those who remain feel almost always obliged, in both public and private spaces, not to "speak ill of the dear departed."
I would like, on the contrary, to take an unpopular and unpleasant stance to remind us of the misogynistic and sexist cultural devastation of the "Berlusconi era" in Italy, to which we are firmly anchored and from which we are unlikely to emerge anytime soon.
The issue is not Silvio Berlusconi's relationship with women, but rather how it was possible for a European country in the industrialized West to express such unquestioned consensus towards the subculture propagated by the most popular media apparatus in Italian households, with only a few rare cases of opposition and alarm.
With television, which the Italian Communist Party did not realize in the 1980s would be the key to absolute power, the entrepreneur entered every room, invaded the intimacy and subconscious of our country, and dictated, almost uncontested, the mercantile rules of relations between women and men for at least two generations. This phenomenon is described in a half-hour video by Lorella Zanardo titled "Il corpo delle donne" (The Body of Women).
The paradigm of commercial television with its focus on breasts and buttocks, showgirls, and escorts, as seen in programs like "Uomini e donne" (Men and Women) and "Il grande fratello" (Italian version of Big Brother), embodies the audacity, vulgarity, ethics, and aesthetics of self-promotion turned into a system and a value. The only exception was during the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001 when it was demanded that normally hung clothes for drying (especially underwear and panties) not be displayed on balconies and windows, as they could potentially disturb international guests.
In mid-2009, Veronica Lario, then-wife of Silvio Berlusconi, wrote a letter in which she criticized her husband's behavior (including his fondness for being in the company of underage girls), thus setting the fast track to their divorce.
Newspapers and television channels owned by her famous husband distinguished themselves by launching a direct attack against Veronica Lario, describing her as an overweight elderly woman.
The former Prime Minister had already gained worldwide notoriety for, among other things, referring to a German Green Party deputy as a Nazi, making a "devil horns" gesture behind the neck of a fellow minister in an official photo, and advising a ‘young precarious woman’ to marry a wealthy man (perhaps his own son) in order to "settle down."
Berlusconi encouraged his football team, Monza, by making an enticing promise: to offer them a bus filled with women as a reward for their victory. The exact word he used was “whores”
The notorious "elegant dinners" - with the participation of young women who were paid for their presence - had already come to light. The "Mubarak's niece" had become a global story: Karima El Mahroug, known as "Ruby Rubacuori," a young woman of Moroccan origin, had been arrested by the Milan police for theft on the night of May 27, 2010. Nonetheless, Berlusconi, as the Prime Minister, secured her immediate release on the pretext that she was the niece of the Egyptian president.
There was also the incident where Chancellor Merkel was referred to as an "unf**kable fat ass" by someone who is now considered a statesman worthy of national funeral honors, according to an unyielding institutional protocol.
At the beginning of last year, there was a risk of seeing Berlusconi become the President of the Republic. A group of women then launched an appeal against this possibility, highlighting how normalization is at the heart of Italy's extensive misogyny problem. It was accepted, even among left-wing political forces, that a figure like the former Prime Minister, president of Forza Italia, could occupy the highest office of the State, despite what he had represented for Italian politics, forgetting that he had been definitively convicted in 2013 for tax fraud.
In December 2022, with his young "partner," sitting half a meter away from him and listening, Berlusconi encouraged his football team, Monza, by making an enticing promise: to offer them a bus filled with women as a reward for their victory. The exact word he used was "whores."
Truly, a heavy legacy to bear...