Over the course of his life, Berlusconi was many things: a cruise-ship crooner, a media entrepreneur, Italy's richest man, and its longest-serving postwar leader. Above all, he was a larger-than-life figure who polarised modern Italian society and politics like few before him.

Mired in a sex scandal, Silvio Berlusconi held a dinner party at a posh Rome hotel in 2010 to charm reporters - but struggled to play it straight: "You're all invited to the bunga bunga!" he told us defiantly.