La guerra di Segrate. Il primo scontro fra Berlusconi e «la Repubblica»

Abstract

The fight between the biggest Italian entrepreneurs of the eighties, Silvio Berlusconi and Carlo De Benedetti, it's an exemplar vicissitude of the transition from the First to the Second Italian Republic. In fact into the War of Segrate, the financial and judiciary clash happened between the 1984 and the 1991 for the control of the publishing house Mondadori, we find a lot of phenomena typical of the First Republic, from the ambiguous connections between the institutions, the mass media and the political power to the difficult relationships between civil society and the leading class. At the same time, the War of Segrate has been one of the founding episodes of the Second Republic, characterized by the sunset of the mass party that emerged during the thirties and forties and from the birth of two anomalous parties: the enterprise-party of Berlusconi and the newspaper- party of «la Repubblica». Analyzing the crisis of the mass party, ethical power with thousands of members and a structure similar to the State’s one, we have recognized the necessity of spreading the spectrum of the Italian political history further the traditional history of the parties to deal with the study of the seventies, eighties and nineties of the twentieth century. We have therefore placed at the center of the narrative the War of Segrate, recounting the years of transition from the point of view of the newspaper founded and led by liberal-socialist Eugenio Scalfari. The journalists' sources, memoirs, television programs, supplemented by parliamentary debate, have let us to paint a picture of the relationships between the powers of different nature in the Italy of the "long" eighties. [edited by author]