A scourge called Silvio

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
By Alexander Stille
Penguin, 384 pp., $25.95

Imagine, writes the journalist and essayist Alexander Stille, that Italy's Silvio Berlusconi were Bill Gates. Aside from being the richest man in the United States, Gates would own or control all but one of our TV networks, along with Time Warner, HBO, Aetna, Fidelity, The Los Angeles Times , and the New York Yankees. And he would have been our president and commanded a majority in Congress, until barely losing an election a couple of months ago.

However unimaginable (though Stille sees Berlusconi as the grotesque projection of a bottom-line mentality that drags down cultures and polities world wide, ours included), you would need to imagine still more wildly. So, for example, this Berlusconian Gates as a statesman:

Raising two fingers, the classic cuckold sign, behind the head of the Spanish foreign minister in a group photograph.

Having noted German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's several marriages, inviting him at a summit conference to expound his thoughts on women.

And as a businessman:

Sitting down at the Elysée Palace piano to serenade President François Mitterrand with ``Au Revoir, Paris" after lobbying him for the purchase of a French TV channel.

Using his political connections to divert a Milan airport glide-path from the monster apartment project he was developing. The new path would be over a smaller development he'd already marketed.

Telling his salesmen that each morning he stands before a mirror to chant over and over: ``I like myself."

And, as quoted : ``Think of how many women there are out there who would like to go to bed with me, but don't know it. Life is a problem of communication."

``The Sack of Rome," is Stille's title for his massive study of the flamboyant hijacker of Italy's admittedly decayed and often corrupt political processes. It would be hard not to think of it as a piece of commedia dell'arte, with Italy as the deviously wooed Columbine, and Berlusconi playing both bullying Pantaloon and sardonic (and lecherous) Harlequin, as well as the landlord who funnels an exorbitant rake-off from the troupe's use of the town square.

Fundamentally, of course, Stille's account is much grimmer. Just as some paranoiacs, as the saying goes, have real enemies, there are megalomaniacs who are truly very large. So large as to blight what is around them.

Here, among the blight effects, there is the further hollowing out of Italian political life. There are the inroads upon press freedom as Berlusconi's government powers, added to his formidable economic strength, have worked to damp down criticism. In one grotesque example, according to Stille, state television showed hearty applause for a Berlusconi address to the General Assembly: The clapping, however, was a clip from a speech by Kofi Annan , United Nations secretary-general .

There is an economic decline owing in part to the enlargement of statist monopolies. Italy's great business giants now find most of their profits in the public sector, with a corresponding dependence on the figure atop it. Pirelli runs Telecom (communications), Stille writes; Fiat is involved in the power grid; and Benetton, having opened the way to popular fashions, operates the highways.

Then there is the justice system , notably the muffling of ``Clean Hands," the great anti corruption drive spearheaded in the 1990 s by a group of courageous investigating magistrates, with perhaps 5 ,000 indictments lodged, some touching on Berlusconi and several close associates. One muffler is a measure passed by his Parliament that allows defendants to demand that prosecutors -- not just judges and juries -- be disqualified for prejudice.

In a mass of detail, fascinating though occasionally marred by repetition and loose writing, Stille sets out Berlusconi's financial rise, based at first on real estate, and then on advertising and publicity , and his acquisitions in publishing and the media. He writes of his entry into politics, culminating in a crushing majority in Parliament after the 2001 elections.

He writes of his membership in the Masonic P2 Lodge, a mutually assisting network that included financiers, politicians, and officials in the military and intelligence services. He writes extensively of Mafia connections, and of all manner of spectacularly outrageous deals.

Whether all this represents an irreversible downturn in Italy's public life is not clear, though Stille seems inclined to think so. True, Berlusconi lost the April election, but the margin was infinitesimal, and the new center-left coalition under Romano Prodi is unstable. Berlusconi's economic power and above all his hold on television, which almost made him a winner, remain a formidable and essentially unshaken political resource.

Then there is his ability, up to now, to appeal to what Stille describes as an intrinsic bent among many Italians. If shameless conflicts of interest as a way of life may seem shocking, they seem less so to quite a few in the vast number of Italians who run small family trades and enterprises and have no interest in any wider or more public scrutiny.

Asked why, to avoid scandal, he didn't sell off some part of his media holdings, this small-time finagler swollen to Godzilla dimensions replied: ``I can't, I have five children."

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.