Gabriele d’Annunzio: A Selection from Taras Grescoe’s Possess the Air (2020)

“If any one man was responsible for Fascism’s militaristic spirit—and much of its outward trappings—it was not Mussolini, but a short, bald, bow-legged poet, who had long been known to his adoring followers as Il Duce. . . . More than any single person, [Gabriele d’Annunzio] bore responsibility for drawing Italians into the First World War, and for the subsequent chaos that would give birth to Fascism.

The son of a wine merchant from the Abruzzi, d’Annunzio first made his name in Rome in the 1890s by promoting a story about his own premature death after a fall from horseback. While his writing style, in such novels as Pleasure, The Triumph of Death, and The Virgins of the Rocks, was studded with obscure archaisms and as convoluted as wrought-iron grillwork, he was obsessed by all that was modern: airplanes, automobiles, mechanized war. Though contemptuous of democracy, he ran for, and won, a seat as a Liberal member from his home riding in the Abruzzi, before crossing the floor to join the Socialists, only to denounce them in one of the few speeches he could be bothered to deliver in Parliament.

In his private life, d’Annunzio epitomized every cliché of fin de siècle decadence. He ran up, and ran out on, huge bills collecting Orientalist bric-a-brac. He was said to go through a pint of cologne—which he personally concocted from the most obscure essences—every day. At various times, he was addicted to opiates, cocaine, and sugar cubes soaked in ether. Though he seduced and abandoned the most celebrated beauties of the day, including Eleonora Duse, Italy’s most famous actress, most people found him lacking in physical charm. He’d lost his curly black locks early in life, going bald, he claimed, after being wounded in a duel. The French poet Romain Rolland called him ‘a low-life Adonis.’ A celebrated Parisian courtesan, hoping to meet Italy’s new Casanova, was disappointed to encounter ‘a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth, bad breath, and the manners of a mountebank.’ Utterly without empathy—he preferred his lovers sick or dying, and lost interest in them when they recovered—he was probably bipolar, and certainly a sociopath. . . .

D’Annunzio and his followers . . . established both the style and substance of Fascism. Their ululating chant of ‘Eia, Eia, Eia, Alalà!’—d’Annunzio had swapped the barbaric ‘Hip! Hip! Hurrah!’ with what he claimed was the battle yell of Achilles—would be adopted by the Fascist thugs who terrorized the cities. Their marching hymn, Giovinezza (‘Youth-time,’ an implicit rebuke to aged Liberal politicians), would become the movement’s anthem. The black tunics of the Arditi would become Fascism’s uniform, and the straight arm raised skywards, followed by the cry A Noi! (‘To us!’) would become its official salute. Even the tactic of feeding castor-oil to political enemies was first used by d’Annunzio’s legionaries. The constitution of Fiume—in which ‘corporations’ of workers and owners replaced trade unions—became the direct inspiration for the corporative-state of Fascist totalitarianism. And d’Annunzio’s celebration of Fiume as the ‘City of the Holocaust’—until then an obscure term describing a sacrifice in which the victim is consumed by fire—would come to be applied to the twentieth-century’s most fearsome human conflagrations.”—Taras Grescoe, Possess the Air: Love, Heroism, and the Battle for the Soul of Mussolini’s Rome (2020)