Nicole Minetti, Gue Pequeno, Paolo Sorrentino, the President of the Republic – the fictional one played by Tony Servillo and the real one – the institute of pardon, the mafia, Marcello Dell’Utri, South America and the government of Giorgia Meloni: what links all these elements? Silvio Berlusconi and his enormous and crucial human, political, economic, historical and cultural legacy.

Berlusconi was this country and, in the end, this country ended up becoming Silvio Berlusconi. At this historical juncture, political and judicial news forces us to return to dealing with our recent past. Three decades, six decades of Berlusconism, have left consequences, half-truths and attractive witnesses who – no one knows how or why – all ended up in South America. First “Ruby Heartbreaker” – yes, Mubarak’s infamous niece, born Karima El Mahroug, who after the scandal of the elegant and underage dinners, went on to open a restaurant-resort called Sofia House on the Mexican coast – then Minetti ended up, one in Mexico and the other in Uruguay. And like all poorly kept secrets, these come back to light in a roundabout way.

Berlusconi’s magical realism

Minetti – whom Gue Pequeno, after a quick summer flirtation in 2013, defined as “good as many others” – was definitively sentenced to two years and ten months for inducing and aiding and abetting prostitution in the “Ruby bis” trial (when she went to the police station to pick up the then Moroccan minor and called Berlusconi, then Prime Minister, “Love of my life”, confiding to a friend “tonight I’ll dress like a teacher with my glasses and garter belt, I have sexy underwear underneath”), and 1 year and 1 month for embezzlement in the Rimborsopoli investigation (here too, thanks to Berlusconi, she was a candidate and elected in 2010 on the President’s list of the Lombardy Regional Council). She was then pardoned by the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella “for humanitarian reasons”, i.e. to allow her, as a mother, to assist a minor family member in serious health conditions. Beyond the necessary investigations that are taking place in recent days, what shines through in this story is the enormity of the bizarreness, the waste, the amazement that surrounds everything that has to do with the Knight and his associates. What would be impossible for all of us ordinary mortals, for all those who have had to deal with him, appears plausible, probable, credible. We end up perceiving our country as a sort of banana republic, of South American origin. It was almost as if we were faced with the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, but with a little more tattoos, extensions, Botox, fillers, prostitutes and orgies. Anyway, at a certain point in the film Grace by Sorrentino – the same one who shot the unobtainable film (at least for us Italians) “They” on Berlusconi’s political and existential parable – the President of the Republic, played by Tony Servillo, sings a verse of the song “The little girls are crying!” by Gue Pequeno (“With black Amex and gold Visa crushing it / Two half-Filipinas in Philippe Plein, triangle / Purple clouds in the sky, my accounts are getting bigger / You, you when you rap, the little girls cry”). Everything is held. In Italy.

Dell’Utri, the 42 million and the ghost of the “Stalliere di Arcore”

The other matter which presents us with a great classic of this infinite and cyclical barlusconeid sees Marcello Dell’Utri and his wife Miranda Ratti sent to trial for the affair of the approximately 42 million euros received from Silvio Berlusconi through eight bank transfers between 2014 and 2024. Dell’Utri, after the mafia conviction, was required to communicate to the authorities any change in assets, an obligation which according to the prosecution he would have violated by not declaring at least 10 million of the 42 donated by the Knight. Initially the investigation file was based on the principle of implicit exchange: money in exchange for silence on the mafia massacres, with Berlusconi himself under investigation in Florence.

But, in any case, the aggravating circumstance of mafia facilitation was then dropped and the only violation of the reporting obligations by Dell’Utri remained. In short, a story that refers, even if only indirectly, to the “grow boy of Arcore” (the boss Vittorio Mangano, defined by Dell’Utri himself as “a hero in his own way” and honored by Berlusconi himself) and to the season of mafia massacres of the two-year period 1992-1993. Berlusconi himself was investigated several times (in Florence, Palermo, Caltanissetta) as a possible external instigator of the 1993 massacres, but in all proceedings he was later acquitted or dismissed due to insufficient evidence. Furthermore, in some trials on the “State-mafia negotiation”, the hypothesis of a political-financial relationship between Berlusconi, Dell’Utri and the mafia was put forward several times, which however never led to convictions, remaining largely at the level of investigative news and debate. But Dell’Utri himself was definitively convicted of external complicity in a mafia association because the judges considered it proven that he acted as a mediator between Berlusconi and Cosa Nostra. However, the Court of Cassation itself has often clarified that, as far as Berlusconi is concerned, the necessary elements to configure an external competition were not present, however leaving open a political-historiographical debate on his relations with the mafia.

Berlusconi’s political legacy: the Meloni government

In short, on the one hand the pardon (perhaps fake, and in any case debated) to Nicole Minetti, on the other the indictment of Dell’Utri for the 42 million received from Berlusconi, remind us how much the political and human parable of Berlusconi and his acolytes has influenced and marked the history of this country. Leaving waste that still poisons the climate today. From business partners to the starlets who enlivened the elegant dinners, these events renew the news events that have animated the political and judicial news of the last twenty years. Until we get to its most important legacy: the Italian center-right as we know it today and its latest metamorphosis: the government of Giorgia Meloni.

Meloni, too, is a legacy of the Cavaliere di Arcore, promoted in the field by the then leader of the National Alliance Gianfranco Fini, precisely by virtue of the fact that Berlusconi had cleared the MSI – favoring the Fiuggi turning point in 1995 – and had brought it with him to govern the country, giving it political dignity in the democratic panorama. A centre-right which, however, to date, is showing its rope, torn as it is by internal strife – Salvini’s Putin-led League against the Atlanticist Brothers of Italy – and by an ongoing transformation in Forza Italia itself, where Marina Berlusconi, armed with a guarantee of around one hundred million euros to guarantee the Azzurri’s debts, is asking for a profound renewal among the ranks of the party’s main exponents, wanting to bring her father’s creature into the moderate centre, to act as the future balance of power of the next government. Because the ultimate aim of the Cavaliere’s party is to be liberal-democratic, but still an instrument to defend the interests of the fault line, whatever the government. This, after all, was the best liberal revolution that this country of ours could afford: defending the Berlusconi family’s business. Including the shameful legacy of Berlusconism.