The Sack of Rome - How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi (Electronic book text)

Imagine if the president of the United States was also the Senate majority leader, possessed Rupert Murdoch's and Mike Bloomberg's media holdings, was as rich as Bill Gates, had the real estate empire and personal arrogance of Donald Trump, and had ties to organized crime, and you begin to get an idea of the hold Silvio Berlusconi has over Italian public life. Conflict of interest? The lawyer who has defended him against corruption is also the president of the Justice Commission of the Italian parliament, which, not coincidentally, retroactively decriminalized many of the offenses with which Berlusconi has been charged. Berlusconi controls the political content that is carried over his television and radio stations, in his newspapers, and in the books published by the houses he owns. His shadow falls one way or another on every corner of Italy and virtually every aspect of Italian life. How did this happen? What does it mean? In acclaimed author Alexander Stille's hands, the answers to those questions come in the form of a hugely entertaining read that gets to the heart of Italy today, and - Lord help us - any number of other countries tomorrow. Italy has long served as a laboratory of bad ideas: in the twentieth century it invented fascism, and now, in the twenty-first, Berlusconi has created the formula of the future, in which unlimited money, celebrity, and media dominance combine to create a dangerous new form of political populism. He has also left a trail of carnage in his wake. Many are the crimes of Silvio Berlusconi, and the incomparable Stille lays them before us and brings them to vivid life as only he can. The Sack of Rome is full of deeds of the sort of ruthless ambitionand naked corruption that would make even a Borgia weep with shame. Ah, Roma.