In the mid-1980s, when I was covering Italy for The Wall Street Journal, I profiled a brash, bruising, billionaire businessman named Silvio Berlusconi who had made a fortune in real estate and parlayed that into control of an almost unrivaled private television empire.

Berlusconi invited me to the book-lined office in his Milan mansion. He’d made his money building a garden city called Milano 2 on the eastern outskirts of Italy’s financial capital. Then he’d made his real money — billions of dollars — through TV networks gathered in a controlling company called Mediaset. By the time I met him, a big chunk of Italy’s television advertising revenue was going into his pocket.

What I recall is the talk — a lot of it — and the voice — he’d worked as a crooner on cruise ships — and the self-confidence and the vulgarity (I had the impression that there was nothing inside the leather-bound books on the shelves). Berlusconi whisked me off in his private jet, and as we climbed over Milan he gestured to the urban sprawl beneath him and told me he was by far the “richest man in Italy.” I countered that surely Giovanni Agnelli, then the head of the Fiat group, was richer. Berlusconi scoffed. There was a lot more of his new money than that old money.

Within a decade or so, in 1994, Berlusconi was prime minister, at the head of a right-of-center political party he’d concocted the previous year, thrust to power on the basis that he would break with Italy’s dysfunctional politics and that, as a self-made billionaire, he knew how to fix problems. He used television unsparingly to buttress his meteoric rise through the wreckage of Italy’s post-1945 political order, which had recently collapsed with the end of the Cold War.