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By the time a wide-eyed U.C.L.A. undergrad made their way to Italy in 1987, the country’s socialist government was thriving, the economy was booming, a year of university studies, even at a top school, cost around $300, and “there was a Benetton on every corner in Manhattan,” as one of their professor’s put it.

But by the early 1990s, that had all collapsed as the government led by socialist leader Bettino Craxi went down in flames and scandal.

That power vacuum led to the rise of the first post-modern politician, as many have called him, Silvio Berlusconi. As he himself openly put it, he got into politics so that he could change laws in order to make himself richer, pay fewer taxes, and avoid legal jeopardy. As he achieved all three of those personal goals, he drove the country’s economy into the toilet with bloated borrowing and destroyed Italy’s image as a progressive nation who protected its vulnerable and cherished its cultural legacy.

He also became the first, in his own words, to legitimize the far and fringe right. Today, the roots of Italy’s first post-fascist (in other words, its first post-war bona fide fascist) government can be traced to his tenure.

Back in the early 2000s, when Italy was the president of the European Union, I was recruited to be an interpreter at the Italian Mission to the United Nations. Because Berlusconi, prime minister at the time, was tasked to address the General Assembly as the president of the EU, the mission needed an extra full-time interpreter. I was assigned to foreign minister Franco Frattini, who represented Italy at the gathering, while the senior interpreter was assigned to Berlusconi.

I never met him but I did attend a meeting where he spoke — and I held my nose.

After his notorious sexual predation parties became well documented by the media, my bandmates and I wrote and produced a song about his bunga bunga. We recorded it in Austin, Texas for our 2011 album “Freudian Slip” (Aeronaut Records). You may have heard it on season 1 (episode 2) of “Emily in Paris” (listen below).

Many have said that Berlusconi created the paradigm, the road map for our country’s own post-fascist, post-supremacist political monster.

But let us not mention the name of that Devil… lest he appear.

Read the Times obit here.