The decline of the Five Star empire

THE QUINCENTENARY of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, which is being marked this year, is a fine moment to savour the Italian talent for walking a step or two ahead of everybody else. The inventory of Italian brainwaves, from double-entry book-keeping to radio, is impressive. In politics, too, Italians have repeatedly anticipated trends and innovated—though not always happily, as with the invention of fascism. In 1968 students in Rome were rioting two months before ever a cobblestone was thrown in Paris. And if today’s right-wing populists have a spiritual father, he is surely Silvio Berlusconi. Like Donald Trump, that priapic property developer used TV to launch himself into politics and successfully marketed an idiosyncratic brand of personalised conservatism.