It's a fantastic subject, and quite a few people have approached it from various angles: My own book about life under Berlusconi was a first-person diary that fumed disbelief and fury more than analysis (I was an angry young man). Paul Ginsborg's Silvio Berlusconi was a brief attempt to talk about theories surrounding postdemocratic politics. David Lane, The Economist's correspondent in Rome, published an impeccable investigation called Berlusconi's Shadow, but it was more biography than anthropology. Alexander Stille takes the best of all those approaches and fuses them into a convincing whole. But for a daft subtitle, The Sack of Rome is an excellent book. It has everything: momentum and suspense, factual presentation and leveled analysis. The only problem is that, due to the lead character, it's not exactly a pleasure to read: It's the kind of book you read bolt upright with straight arms and a permanent grimace.

Stille's great strength is his position as both an insider and an outsider. His father was an editor of the daily Corriere della Sera, and Stille knows Italy as well as, if not better than, many natives. But he comes to his subject with the moral clarity of someone untouched by Italian compromise and corruption. That position allows him to be intimate and informed, while simultaneously critical and, often, scathing. He describes what life was like in Italy when he first went there, long before Berlusconi burst onto the political scene: "Old grey men with their hats and suspenders and handlebar moustaches represented the last remnants of an era when city squares filled with people who wanted to talk about politics. For these old men, born long before the age of television, getting out of the house and talking politics was a form of entertainment and sociability."

The narrative traces the descent from the idealism and intelligence of a print-based culture into a "world in which personality, celebrity, money and media control are the driving forces." When Stille met Berlusconi he found him to be "psychologically one of the strangest people I had ever met. I had never before interviewed anyone who told so many obvious untruths with such enthusiastic conviction." That is the kernel of the difference between the verbal and visual worlds: For Berlusconi everything is about appearance. What is actually true is irrelevant; it's what is perceived to be true that counts. Truth becomes whatever you can get away with saying. In that sense Berlusconi is very much a product of his culture: I know of no other country where illusionism, rhetoric and distraction so frequently substitute the search for simple, old-fashioned facts.

The facts of Berlusconi's career are by now well established. He made his money thanks to the influx of billions of lire that were paid in cash into Swiss bank accounts in the 1970s (8 billion in 1977 alone). Those investors remain anonymous, and Berlusconi has steadfastly refused to shed light on the mysterious transactions. There is a suspicion, repeated by Stille, that Berlusconi's businesses were simply giant washing machines for Mafia money. Such suspicions are only exacerbated by the overlap of Forza Italia (Berlusconi's political party) and Cosa Nostra: "Forza Italia," Stille says with characteristic sarcasm, "has a curious habit of picking representatives who share Dell'Utri's unlucky record of embarrassing encounters with organized crime figures."

Although Stille calls Berlusconi a "robber baron," the book is much more than a character assassination. Stille manages to portray Berlusconi as a complex, contradictory character. The author is sufficiently evenhanded to quote discrepant opinions: One interviewee says that "Berlusconi is one of the coldest people I've ever met. He does nothing that is not strictly calculated. These friendships are based on blackmail. The people in his inner circle are the ones who know where all the skeletons in the closet are hidden." Another says something rather different: "I have spent time with Berlusconi's secretary, Marinella, and I have no doubt that if she knew a bullet were heading toward Berlusconi she would put herself in front of it. Not many people can count on that kind of loyalty." Perhaps the key to understanding Berlusconi is his obsession with folly. He loves to project an image of himself as an impulsive genius, subject to sudden inspiration. His favorite book is Erasmus's The Praise of Folly.

Facts and figures pepper the pages of The Sack of Rome and remind the reader of what the reality is: An obsession with legality leads, paradoxically, to lawlessness. "Italy," says Stille, "leads Europe...in having some 90,000 laws in force (compared with 7,325 in France and 5,587 in Germany)." Transparency International, a company that measures corruption throughout the world, now ranks Italy below African countries like Namibia and Botswana. Bribes bleed about 6.3 billion euros ($8 billion) a year from the Italian economy. The number of illegal buildings rocketed by 41 percent from 2001 to 2003. Such shady financing is possible because there are only 240 large corporations listed on the Italian stock exchange. The rest are privately held and, usually, family-owned. There's a focus on profit, not probity. Little surprise, then, that foreign investors withdrew $17 billion from Italy during Berlusconi's first government.

Nor do any of these facts ever get reported inside Italy. Reporters Without Borders, an organization monitoring freedom of the press throughout the world, rates Italy fifty-third in the world, behind Uruguay, Albania and Madagascar. In the European elections of 1999, Berlusconi offered the country some 803 political advertisements. That led to a conundrum his opponents still haven't solved: "Since public TV in Italy does not broadcast political ads," Stille writes, "the center-left was in the impossible position of either giving money to its opponent or doing without television advertising." This in a country in which the average adult watches 235 minutes of television each day. (In 2001 only 6.4 percent of Italians used newspapers as their principal means of information; 77.4 percent used television.)

Stille's conclusion sounds a warning to America about the dangers of this kind of cozy relationship between news organizations, high finance and central government. He compares Berlusconi to the New Jersey Democrat Jon Corzine and New York City's Republican Mayor Mike Bloomberg. The point about Italian illusionism is relevant in America, where, says Stille, "for years, conservatives...have accused the left of 'moral relativism,' of denying the existence of a universal moral code, the 'eternal verities' of traditional society. But it is in fact the new right who are genuine postmodernists and don't believe in any stable truth. 'It's all just opinion,' as Richard Viguerie put it."

There's only one problem with Stille's studious work: timing. It's published just as Berlusconi has been shunted off the political stage and comes in the wake of dozens of other studies in both English and Italian. There will doubtless be another chapter or two in the Berlusconi fable: He's not the kind of man to wander off with quiet dignity. The Sack of Rome comes too late to offer a running commentary on a politician at his peak, and yet too soon to give the reader a sense of the last act and the Berlusconi legacy.

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