This one is about Gabriele D'Annunzio. Italian poet, born in 1863 . . . I can already sense your attention drifting. But hang in there!
A more lurid description would be that he is the poet who seduced over a thousand women. It is still puzzling exactly what women saw in him. As one bewildered woman said:
"I have just met D'Annunzio. Can this be the man the great Duse loved? He is small, he is bald, and his teeth are in three different colours."
(The great Duse here being Eleonora Duse, the most famous actress of the age.)
When war broke out in 1914 Italy very sensibly stayed out of it. But D'Annunzio loved the thought of Italy at war and the blood sacrifice it would involve. So he wrote article after article and eventually returned to Italy, where he gave speech after speech demanding war and encouraging cheering crowds to lynch the peace-lovers in government. He got his way and Italy joined the war in 1915.
The war, of course, was a catastrophe.
In fairness to D'Annunzio, he didn't just preach war, he participated. Despite being in his fifties he forced his way in (much to the concern of the government, who thought him more useful as a propagandist than as a corpse). As part of this he flew numerous bombing missions. And ever the poet, when they finally developed a plane strong enough to get him to Vienna he took the opportunity to drop pamphlets he had composed urging them to throw off the Austro-Hungarian imperial yoke and ending:
"Today I drop words; next time I will drop bombs."
One reason for his love of the war was his belief that Italy was incomplete. Unification had left outside it cities on the Dalmatian coast that many thought were basically Italian (their many non-Italian residents disagreed, of course). So when the Allies treated their Italy with contempt at the peace talks, D'Annunzio decided to act. With a few followers, swelled to thousands by deserting Italian troops, he marched into Fiume, which he ruled as a sort of dictator. The occupation was both comedic and tragic. But the really important thing was the style of the dictatorship. Almost every night D'Annunzio would appear on the balcony giving speeches in a style we'd now instantly recognise as fascist. Meanwhile the real fascists, Mussolini in particular, were watching and thinking ‘This is great, I could use this!’.
My guest was Lucy Hughes-Hallett, and her biography of D'Annunzio, The Pike, won the Samuel Johnson Prize. And this episode is terrific!
