STARTING AS HE MEANT TO CONTINUE

Milan, Italy's gritty design and finance hub, is the City where people get things done: they graft, they sell, they make and design, they earn. It's not like Rome, the beautiful capital, in which locals sit around waiting for the tourists to come and drop money in their laps, and where Italy's gilded and venal political class line their pockets and enjoy long lunches. Milan-born Silvio Berlusconi understood the potential of both his hometown and the Eternal City — that is, money and power, respectively. And he cashed in spectacularly.

If becoming a hedonistic multimillionaire politician were easy, then we'd all be at it. It's a testament to Berlusconi's genius as a businessman and politician — and key to his popular and vicarious appeal — that he started with very little and rose to become Italy's richest man and dominate its politics for two decades.

Like many exceptional individuals, his background was anything but. Berlusconi's father, Luigi, worked as a clerk in the one-branch Rasini bank in Milan. His mother, Rosella, was a housewife, although, by most accounts, she ruled the roost. According to friends of the family, it is from his mother that Silvio Berlusconi got his get-up-and-go. His affectionate nature was probably due in large part to a loving bond with his father, Luigi.

Berlusconi recalled the day his father finally returned home after a long absence during the Second World War. Young Silvio waited anxiously at Como railway station, north of Milan, before finally seeing his father get off the train. He remembered racing along the platform to embrace his dad. "That moment has remained in my memory as the most agonizing and the happiest of my life," he once said. Some reports suggest Berlusconi's high opinion of himself was probably thanks to both parents, who eschewed any criticism for constant praise and adoration. "Our Silvio is better than all of them" was the message drummed into him in his impressionable early years.

He was born in 1936 in what was then the city's northern edge. Today the area, Isola, is Milan's most up-and-coming neighborhood. Trendy bars and shops buzz in the shadow of skyscrapers that are continually sprouting up in the giant construction site around the nearby Garibaldi railway station. These days when he's in Milan, Berlusconi, the former real-estate magnate, no doubt casts a wistful glance at the gleaming edifices. "If I were just starting up now," he might tell himself, "I'd make a killing." Who would doubt it?

Young Silvio's parents packed him off to a strict Catholic boarding school in the city at the age of 11. Berlusconi rose at 7 every morning to study mathematics, history, philosophy, languages and religion, with the rosary after lunch. He always obtained good grades. It didn't go unnoticed, however, by the Salesian priests who ran the establishment, that his religious conviction was somewhat lacking. A school friend recalled how Berlusconi would drift away during prayers; his lips "moved mechanically; his thoughts were clearly elsewhere."

This was probably the earliest recorded evidence of the vexed relationship with religion that has marked his career. Berlusconi's political instincts have told him that in Vatican-influenced Italy, he needs to keep the Church on board. But playing at being a good Catholic has always been at odds with his libertine personal philosophy. The result has been numerous shows of fake piety — until finally, toward the end of his career, the documented tide of sleaze that engulfed Berlusconi was such that any religious posturing became pointless.

Back at the prayer sessions in the Sant'Ambrogio Salesian Institute, the young Berlusconi probably had business in mind. In his early teens he was already doing the homework of slower or lazier classmates in return for their pocket money. This conservative educational institute probably drummed into him the anticommunist rhetoric that he would continue to spout for the rest of his life. And it was at this boarding school that the future tycoon met lifelong friend Fedele Confalonieri. More than sixty years on, Berlusconi and Confalonieri — who now runs the mogul's TV empire — remain as thick as thieves. Berlusconi's second wife would compare their relationship to that of two brothers. The friendship also set a pattern that has seen Berlusconi stick by key associates with unswerving loyalty — loyalty that is mutual and underpinned, no doubt, by a shared knowledge of where all the skeletons are hidden.

Confalonieri, the dour straight man to Berlusconi's vaudeville act, shared with his school friend a passion for music. By the age of 16 the pair were putting on improvised shows, with Confalonieri on piano and Berlusconi twanging the double bass and crooning standards made popular by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Yves Montand.

By the late 1950s, when Berlusconi had to pay his way through Milan's Statale University, he was earning extra money as a singer and host on Mediterranean cruise ships, putting his natural charm to good use, effortlessly entertaining large groups for hours at a time with songs, jokes and patter. With his hair slicked back and his winning smile never more than a couple of seconds away, the young entertainer made up for his short stature (he's just five feet five inches) with his boy-next-door good looks and easy charm. Confalonieri has attested that Berlusconi never had any difficulty wooing the ladies.

Berlusconi graduated in law in 1961, with top honors. His thesis on the contractual aspects of advertising even won an award from a local advertising agency.

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And so, in the early 1960s, Berlusconi, the ambitious young graduate, found himself in the right place at the right time. The postwar expansion of the Italian economy was in full flow. And Milan, the country's business capital, was the hottest spot of all. Thanks to the city's entrepreneurial spirit, good links with the rest of Europe and an abundance of cheap labor arriving from the poorer south of the country, there was money to be made — and Berlusconi knew it.

After graduating, Berlusconi sold vacuum cleaners for a while. But it occurred to him that selling property would be easier — and a lot more profitable. He just needed enough cash to get things going. He managed to convince the head of his father's bank, the tiny Banca Rasini, to guarantee the loan needed to build his first apartments in Via Alciati in Milan. His famous powers of persuasion were next in evidence when he sold the first Via Alciati property to Confalonieri's...