Silvio Berlusconi died at 9:30 on June 12, 2023, at the San Raffaele hospital in Milan.
The former premier, leader of Forza Italia and founder of Mediaset was 86 years old.
The funeral will be held on Wednesday 14-06, in the Milan Cathedral.

Rather, for better or for worse, the founder of a new right and a new politics,
with liberal ambitions and populist traits, who made school in the world
and dominated the Italian scene for twenty years, even when he was in opposition.
And then it ended with him, so much so that in order to win again he had
to change his skin, sex, age,
and incarnate in Giorgia Meloni, anthropologically his opposite.

But he wants to resist. Do not give up. Don’t resign as prime minister.
“That’s what Berlusconi must do,” all those around him suggest to him,
who have always lived on reflected light and want to keep it lit.
But then two phone calls arrive. The first is from Ennio Doris,
a friend and former partner in Mediolanum:
“Silvio, if you don’t resign, Italy will collapse”.
The second is from his son Luigi, who works in the City of London:
«Dad, if Italy collapses, our companies will collapse too».
Thus the “Black Knight”, the Caiman who in the film played by Nanni Moretti finally instigates
the popular revolt in order not to give up power,
resigns by accepting the inexorable logic of democratic politics.
And in a single afternoon the most used argument against him,
the “conflict of interest” between private companies and the public function,
turns into its opposite. Having pursued power, according to his enemies only for his own interest,
he must give up power also in his own interest.
The “larger than life” dimension, out of the ordinary, of the human and political story
of the Cavaliere is all in the moment in which he left Palazzo Chigi forever
(and which he then repeatedly declassified as a mere “conspiracy”,
thus wronging above all himself and the responsible choice he made).
The choruses of “buffoon, buffoon” under Palazzo Chigi and the cheering crowds
in front of the Quirinale for his resignation did not honor that historic day in its own way.
As in the evening of the coins in Craxi, an Italy capable of cowardly outrage showed itself then,
after long years of servitude praise. Because Berlusconi was a phenomenon: will to power,
of course, but also historical necessity.
Together the fruit of the Italian disease and at the same time his attempt to cure.
Not the evildoer who conquers a gullible people with horse doses of TV sales pitch,
as has been described; but not even the savior of the homeland who liberates his country
from Occhetto’s Cossacks, the first of the many leaders of the left he defeate

d.

The anti-Berlusconi professionals have accused him of every crime. And it is true that more than twenty trials have been brought against him, with various charges, sometimes particularly defamatory, such as the exploitation of child prostitution in the person of Ruby Rubacuori, one of the many participants in the sarabanda of girls who hosted in his villas; or as the suspicion of collusion with the mafia that led one of his greatest friends and comrades in arms, Marcello Dell’Utri, to conviction and prison; or even the accusation of having plotted the massacres of 1993 to accelerate his own political triumph. He has been acquitted, acquitted or otherwise prescribed from almost all the charges, also thanks to the dilatory arts of his crowd of lawyers, led by his faithful and now deceased Ghedini.

Many stains have obscured its public life. The origin of the capital with which Berlusconi started his business as an entrepreneur is still shrouded in mystery. The use of the parliamentary majority to enact ad personam laws in order to defend oneself from trials replaced promises to reform the judicial system that were never kept. And the television empire, born with a ploy to get around the ban, the diffusion of cassettes recorded on a local TV network.
However, as always in his life, each of these events has its twist.

At 86, he even hoped for not a short moment to seal his extraordinary biography by transforming it into a legend, with his election to the Quirinale. The mere fact that he dreamed it told us all about the twilight of his era. He has many alibis. And not only in the stubborn fury of the prosecutors (Milan in the lead) against him. The two tragic epochal events that shocked the world at the very beginning of his governments, the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 and the subprime crisis in 2008, certainly held back his ambitions. But his passage in the political history of Italy has also left indelible traces: for example the bipolarity, a season dominated by him, and perhaps not by chance immediately ended as soon as he left the scene, to give space in recent years to the ancient Italian vices of transformism and majorities that change like clothes with the changing of the seasons. Not even the latest “miracle” succeeded. Once Don Verzè, founder of the San Raffaele in Milan of which he was a friend and benefactor, revealed that he had asked him “to live up to 150 years to put Italy right”. He was counting on the progress of science, or perhaps he was joking about his right to immortality. He died in that same hospital at the age of 86, just two more than the national average. Confirming his nature as an “arch-Italian”, of autobiography of the nation, of that Italy of which in a famous incipit he said “it is the country I love”.