He received the election anyway. For his marketing campaign, Forza Italia despatched a 127-page shiny journal to doorsteps throughout Italy. Known as “An Italian Story,” it supplied a fairy-tale model of Mr. Berlusconi’s life, placing notes that resonated with aspirational Italians: His wealth, his respect for his father and love for his mom, his insistence on punctuality, even his consuming habits. “His food regimen relies on carbohydrates at noon and protein within the night,” the journal stated. “He can’t resist apple pie, a specialty of his mom, Rosella, and he hates garlic and onion.”
It defined the tip of his first marriage, to Carla Dall’Oglio: “The household was tranquil and untroubled, however one thing in his relationship with Carla began to alter, and by the start of the ’80s their love had became an in depth friendship.”
In 1980, at age 44 and nonetheless married to Ms. Dall’Oglio, Mr. Berlusconi met Veronica Lario, an actress who was starring within the play “The Magnificent Cuckold,” a 1920 farce by the Belgian dramatist Fernand Crommelynck. When their first daughter was born in 1984, Mr. Berlusconi acknowledged the kid and separated from his spouse. He married Ms. Lario in 1990. The couple divorced in 2014.
In 2022, at age 85, he had a “symbolic,” wedding ceremony along with his girlfriend, Marta Fascina, then 32, wherein she wore a white wedding ceremony costume they usually reduce an unlimited wedding ceremony cake. Already a member of Parliament, she returned to symbolize a Sicilian city she had by no means campaigned in, turned a gatekeeper and energy dealer and, for his 86th birthday, organized for a hot-air balloon to launch 1000’s of crimson balloon hearts over his villa’s backyard.
Mr. Berlusconi is survived by a daughter, Maria Elvira, generally known as Marina, who’s chairwoman of Fininvest, the household’s holding firm, and a son, Pier Silvio, who’s deputy chairman and chief government officer of the Berlusconi-controlled broadcast firm, Mediaset, each from his first marriage; three kids, Barbara, Eleonora and Luigi, from his second marriage; a brother, Paolo; 15 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
