Silvio Berlusconi dies at the age of 86

Berlusconi died this Monday around 9:30 a.m., according to sources at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan.

The state funeral of the former Italian prime minister will be this Wednesday in the cathedral of Milan (north), after a two-day funeral chapel in his mansion and at the headquarters of his television, Mediaset.

The funeral will take place in the "Duomo" or cathedral of his hometown at 3:00 p.m. local time (1:00 p.m. GMT) on Wednesday in the presence of authorities from the country's political, social, and economic life, headed by the chief of the State, Sergio Mattarella.

The funeral will be presided over by the Archbishop of Milan, Monsignor Mario Delphini.

Starting today, the coffin of the deceased tycoon with leukemia will be exhibited at his Villa Martino in Arcore, a town near Monza, north of Milan, where he has already arrived aboard a car from the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, where he died on Monday. .

The funeral chapel will foreseeably begin today in his mansion, to which numerous followers have already arrived, and tomorrow it will move to the headquarters of his television, Mediaset, in the Milanese neighborhood of Cologno Monzese.

Berlusconi, 86, had been admitted last Friday, three weeks after being discharged, as he had spent 44 days hospitalized for pneumonia aggravated by leukemia that he had suffered for a long time.

Berlusconi's health had worsened in recent months and concern increased in early April, when he was admitted to hospital in intensive care. It was then confirmed that he had leukemia and, although he was discharged 45 days later, last week he returned to the center again.

During that time, he was accompanied at all times by his partner, Marta Fascina, and received visits from his closest collaborators, from his partners, such as Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, and from his family, such as his five children, as well as numerous friends. .

From the hospital, the tycoon even appeared in two videos: one to encourage Italians to vote in local elections and another to intervene in his party's convention, in which he claimed to be "ready" to return to battle. .

The medical report from his trusted doctor, Alberto Zangrillo, revealed that Berlusconi was being treated for a "lung infection" caused by "a chronic hematological condition that he has been carrying for a long time: chronic myelomonocytic leukemia."

Chronic myeloid leukemia is a form of blood cancer that can appear especially in people over 60 years of age and the doctors then specified that he was undergoing "specialized cytoreductive treatment" and chemotherapy.

Over the years, Berlusconi had been hospitalized on several occasions: on one of them a pacemaker was implanted, while he was also admitted for Covid-19 and on one of the most recent, in January 2022, he was admitted for a urinary infection.

Berlusconi, founder of Forza Italia, has held the head of government three times: between May 1995 and January 1995, between June 2001 and May 2006, and between May 2008 and November 2011. His party is also a member of the current government coalition, together with Matteo Salvini's League and Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy.

Although he had never strayed from the political and media spotlight, Berlusconi returned to an elected position in the last elections, as a senator, oblivious to the judicial, business and personal controversies that have plagued him for practically his entire political career. The most notorious scandal was the so-called "Ruby case", nickname of the young Moroccan with whom Berlusconi allegedly had sexual relations when she was a minor, although he was also accused of having negotiated with the Sicilian mafia (Cosa Nostra) in the 1990s. All ended in acquittal or in the prescription of the crime.

Berlusconi, the son of a middle-class banker who began singing on cruise ships and selling vacuum cleaners, launched a meteoric business career by founding his first construction company, Cantieri Riuniti Milanese, at the age of 25.

In the 1970s, he started up a cable television station that broadcast in one of the Milanese neighborhoods that he himself had built, took over part of the capital of the newspaper "Il Giornale" and created "Canale 5" television.

That 1978 he founded Fininvest, the holding company of the Berlusconi family that today controls an empire formed among others by the Mondadori publishing house, the Medusa film production company and the Mediaset audiovisual group.

A soccer fan, he owned AC Milan from the 1970s until 2017, when he sold it to a Chinese consortium and later bought Monza, a small team that led the elite of Serie A.