seven years ago, in the immediate aftermath of Silvio Berlusconi's March 1994 general election victory, the state-run TV RAI ran a controversial series marking the 50th anniversary of the 1944 Allied landings at Anzio. The programmes featured documentary newsreel footage filmed by a US army crew which entered Italy along with Gen Mark Clark's forces.
Inevitably, the series contained gruesome and dramatic images. There was that of the mutilated body of Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, "on display" in Milan's Piazza Loreto shortly after his execution by partisan fighters in April 1945. Then, too, there was footage of grief-stricken relatives identifying the putrefying bodies of their loved ones among the 335 people shot in the Ardeatine Caves massacre on March 24th, 1944.
The programme's basic "revisionist" line was that Western historians had got it wrong. Mussolini had been a great man - "he who thinks big will make big mistakes", commented the Fascist historian Giano Accame. Never mind his illiberal regime, the thousands imprisoned or deported, his 1938 racial laws, or, worst of all, the fact that he and his Nazi allies sent 5,896 Italian Jews to their deaths in concentration camps. That programme came to mind this week when reading an appeal from the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco (www.enel.it/golem) calling on people to vote against the centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi in next Sunday's election. Remember that Mr Berlusconi's House of the Liberties coalition also comprises both the federalist Northern League and the ex-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale.
Eco calls next Sunday's vote a "moral referendum" and he urges the jaded or disillusioned centre-left voter not to abstain but rather to come out and vote against the installation of a de facto regime in which 90 per cent of Italy's terrestrial TV would be in the hands of one man - Mr Berlusconi. (He already owns 43 per cent via his commercial channels, while the remaining 47 per cent comes via the three RAI state channels which he would, de facto, control).
Umberto Eco goes on to point out just why many Italians are not alarmed by the Berlusconi "anomaly", regardless of ongoing international media concern about both Mr Berlusconi's well-documented judicial problems and his potential "conflict of interests".
There are two types of Berlusconi voter, he suggests - the motivated and the enchanted. The former category contains: the business community, confident that Mr Berlusconi will ease the tax burden; ex-Fascists hopeful of (again) instigating a radical revisionist process; Northern League supporters, keen to stop immigration, clandestine or otherwise; those who agree with Mr Berlusconi's plans to clip the wings of the investigating magistrature, perhaps because they have had their own problems with over-zealous public prosecutors. For all of these, concludes Eco, the Berlusconi "anomaly" is a small price to pay in return for achieving some very specific and much desired ends.
Eco claims that the motivated voters, however, are but a small part of Mr Berlusconi's following. The much larger part are the "enchanted voters". These are voters from that majority of Italians who read few newspapers and even fewer books - Italians for whom Mr Berlusconi's is a "can-do" figure whose private-sector achievements (not to mention fabulous wealth) contrast favourably with the inefficiency and corruption of an over-bureaucratised state sector.
For these voters, a man who has made millions for himself by providing them - along the way - with soap operas, Big Brother, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire and the AC Milan football team is no bad thing. Given that they do not read Italian papers, what would the opinion of Le Monde or the Economist mean to them? "This voter . . . is indifferent as to whether the magazine he is buying is on the left or the right, just as long as it has a bum on the cover. This electorate is indifferent to every accusation [against Mr Berlusconi] and completely unworried about a de facto regime. This voter is the product of our society, of a society that for years and years has paid attention only to the values of success and facile wealth . . ."
Barring huge upsets, the man backed by the enthralled voters will win next Sunday's Italian general election.