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Today is the birthday of Gabriele D’Annunzio, novelist, poet, playwright, aesthete, dandy, playboy, war hero, and the first fascist dictator, who from 1919 to 1920 ruled over the Adriatic city-state of Fiume, establishing many of the political and aesthetic forms followed by Mussolini a few years later.
To learn more about D’Annunzio’s life and accomplishments, see the following works on this site: Read more …
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Approaching D’Annunzio
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Reviewing a story collection in 1925, an American critic compared Gabriele d’Annunzio’s influence on the Italian mindset to that of Rudyard Kipling in England. “[T]o understand him is to understand pre-war and immediately post-war Italy.” [1] That sort of remark is almost inaccessible to us today; when we think of the Great War, if we think of the Great War at all, we surely don’t automatically think of Kipling or d’Annunzio. That is one hurdle in approaching d’Annunzio today. Read more …