ROME — With a combination of savvy media domination, old-fashioned party politics and a salesman’s preternatural charm, Silvio Berlusconi has dominated Italy more than anyone since Mussolini.
And polarized it. “No one had ever so divided Italy and Italians,” wrote Massimo Gramellini, a columnist for the Turin daily newspaper La Stampa.
His resignation on Saturday after 17 years as the paramount figure in Italian politics, just over half of them as prime minister, does not erase his presence from the political stage. He still has a powerful political party, now fighting for its future, and owns Italy’s largest private broadcaster. But it marks the symbolic end of an era in which the media baron held the country under his spell.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/wo...alians.html?hp
The end of an era...Houdini escaped time and time again but in the end it was the economy that finally caught up to him.