ROME: “Italy without Berlusconi”. With three words, the country’s biggest-selling Corriere della Sera daily on Tuesday captured the chasm created by the death of its most seductive and divisive politician.
A youthful Silvio Berlusconi smiled in photographs featured on most front pages as the papers paid tribute to a man who rose from cruise ship crooner to media mogul and three-time prime minister, before dying Monday aged 86.
“It is difficult to imagine a life without Silvio,“ Corriere’s Massimo Gramellini wrote.
Fellow editorialist Aldo Cazzullo said he “seduced a country”.
“Berlusconi’s feat was not founding private televisions or a party that became the biggest in Italy in just three months,“ he wrote.
“Berlusconi’s real feat was making the majority of Italians identify with him. He was enormously rich, and he won the votes of the poor.”
The Messaggero lead with “The Italian dream”, and described Berlusconi as “a man who left a deep footprint”.
“The first populist,“ the centre-left Repubblica daily headline said, with a picture of an unsmiling Berlusconi, his face half in shadow.
“He sought immortality in every gesture of his life and above all in the cult of himself”, wrote Ezio Mauro, who was editor of the Repubblica during much of Berlusconi’s period in power and clashed regularly with him.
The right-wing Giornale, which was owned until not long ago by Berlusconi’s family, called him “everyone’s president”.
“None of the greats who made Italy great ever managed to do as much as him,“ it said.
But the centre-left Domani daily said that while Berlusconi was “a giant”, he had also been “a disaster for the country”.
And the Foglio daily went with a cartoon depicting Berlusconi -- famed for his sex scandals and legal woes -- asking to be made a saint. - AFP
