Italy has long captivated romantics from rainy, dreary, orderly northern Europe. Goethe, Stendhal, Keats and Shelley all flocked to Italy in search of the ideal society. There they found what they thought was a utopia. ‘There is,’ Byron marvelled in a letter home from Ravenna, ‘no law or government at all, and it is wonderful how well things go on without them.’
Well, Silvio Berlusconi has made some of Europe’s wisest men sound like chumps. If the notorious career — chronicled in the podcast Bunga Bunga — of the longest-serving prime minister of Italy since Mussolini and its sometime richest man has done one good thing, it’s to have dispelled for good our quixotic fantasies about his troubled nation.
As we learn in this eight-episode chronicle of his life, Berlusconi was born in 1936, into the comfortable Milanese middle class. He was expected to follow his father, a banker, into business, but a certain showbiz streak marked him out. As a student, he
was a crooner on Adriatic cruise ships, and after an allegedly Mafia-financed spell in real estate in the 1960s, he realised the entertainment business was his true vocation, marrying limelight with lucre.
Berlusconi banned over-seventies from going to prison… then publicly celebrated his 70th birthday
In the 1970s, Berlusconi’s career as a media mogul took off. He founded Italy’s first cable network. Then, circumventing laws against national commercial television, he bought all the regional channels and craftily had them broadcast the same thing at the same time. He still owns the three largest commercial broadcasters.
Bunga Bunga, too eager to get to the infamous sex scandal that broke out in 2010 over an underage prostitute, skips over the significance of the culture created by Berlusconi’s TV empire from the 1980s on.
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