The way in which Berlusconi prepared his death says everything about his legacy. He never had serious plans about his political succession, which is the collective fact; but he prepared the fate of his funeral remains decades in advance, which is the individual fact. The funeral of the Cavaliere began to be in the news so many years ago that today people write about it with the feeling of writing an ephemeris.

Berlusconi has a large stone sarcophagus waiting for him in a crypt, a monument to kitsch (in the “Aztec Cubist” style, according to its author, Pietro Cascella) inspired by the funerary complexes of the Egyptian pharaohs and full of Masonic references.. It is in the gardens of the Villa de San Martino, that of the bunga bunga, a mansion that his lawyers took from the only heiress of the Marquis de Casati —who was a minor and had just been orphaned after a horrible crime— for something more than 100,000 euros. There he ordered the excavation three decades ago of the so-called Heavenly Vault, a mausoleum with space for 36 bodies in addition to his own.. The idea was to bury himself with the Berlusconian gens, with his relatives and close friends. Some rejected the offer, as did Indro Montanelli.

Outside the walls of that crypt, Berlusconi never took seriously the continuity of his political legacy.. The party, Forza Italia, did not transcend the personal project. As a result, both your rivals and your partners spent decades imaginingly dividing up loot that doesn't exist, because it's everywhere.. Like the indebted millionaire who plays with the ambitions of his nephews, he amused himself by making them think that there would be inheritance and heirs.. He practiced with Pier Ferdinando Casini, also with Gianfranco Fini and then with Angelino Alfano. The last to dream of throwing themselves into the Berlusconi pool of votes in a thong were Matteo Renzi and even Matteo Salvini.

What happens nominally with Forza Italia is one thing and its route is quite another.. For the first, it is expected that Antonio Tajani is the one who picks up the baton, although it is not ruled out that Marina Berlusconi, the only one of his daughters with an interest in politics, can also try.. But both have known the morphology of berlusconism for enough time to understand that, with the dog dead, the rage is over.

The newspaper La Stampa said yesterday that with the death of Berlusconi the Second Italian Republic ends and that what is now at stake are the wickerwork of the third. In the short term, a Tibetan burial with Florentine daggers is expected, which for a reason we are talking about Italy. The deputies of Forza Italia support the Government of Giorgia Meloni and, without the leader calling up the ranks, the temptation to undertake adventures on their own will be great, perhaps looking for a center in which to materialize that old dream of bringing Christian Democracy back to life. For her part, Meloni has always aspired to occupy space and turn her Fratelli into the hegemonic right for years to come.. His first big challenge is going to be to tie the Cavaliere orphans short and prevent them from destabilizing his future project before being able to consolidate it..

Hundreds of Italian journalists yesterday wrote lines that they had been chewing for decades, their accountability with the personality to which they have dedicated a notable percentage of their lives. Aldo Cazullo, in Il Corriere della Sera, gave the most synthetic definition of an incomprehensible character. The Italians, he says, voted for Berlusconi because “they found in him things that they felt were their own: distrust of the left, of the State, of the treasury, of the judiciary, of the parties” and of “politics itself.”. Hatred of rules, experts and homilies from the media. Cazullo also chooses his defining anecdote. El Caimano used to say that the most beautiful thing he has been told in his life was said to him by a Milan fan: “Silvio, sei una gran bella figa!”. Whoever is capable of understanding Berlusconi is already prepared to understand this century.