Gabriele D’Annunzio

Gabriele D’Annunzio (born March 12, 1863, Pescara, Italy—died March 1, 1938, Gardone Riviera) was an Italian poet, novelist, dramatist, short-story writer, journalist, military hero, and protofascist political leader. He was the leading writer of Italy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The son of a politically prominent and wealthy Pescara landowner, D’Annunzio was educated at the University of Rome. When he was 16, his first poems, Primo vere (1879; “In Early Spring”), were published. The poems in Canto novo (1882; “New Song”) had more individuality and were full of exuberance and passionate, sensuous descriptions. The autobiographical novel Il piacere (1889; The Child of Pleasure) introduces the first of D’Annunzio’s passionate Nietzschean superman heroes; another appears in L’innocente (1892; The Intruder). D’Annunzio had already become famous when his best-known novel, Il trionfo della morte (1894; The Triumph of Death), appeared. It and his next major novel, Le vergini delle rocce (1896; The Maidens of the Rocks), featured viciously self-seeking and wholly amoral Nietzschean heroes.

D’Annunzio continued his prodigious literary production until World War I. His major poetic work is the lyrical collection Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi (1899; “In Praise of Sky, Sea, Earth, and Heroes”). The third book in this series, Alcyone (1904), a re-creation of the smells, tastes, sounds, and experiences of a Tuscan summer, is considered by many his greatest poetic work.

In 1894 D’Annunzio began a long liaison with the actress Eleonora Duse and turned to writing plays for her, notably the tragedies La Gioconda (performed 1899) and Francesca da Rimini (performed 1901). He eventually broke off the relationship and exposed their intimacy in the erotic novel Il fuoco (1900; The Flame of Life). D’Annunzio’s greatest play was La figlia di Iorio (performed 1904; The Daughter of Jorio), a powerful poetic drama of the fears and superstitions of Abruzzi peasants.

New plays and a novel followed, but these failed to finance D’Annunzio’s extravagant lifestyle, and his indebtedness forced him to flee to France in 1910. When World War I broke out, he returned to Italy to passionately urge his country’s entry into the war. After Italy declared war, he plunged into the fighting himself, seeking out dangerous assignments in several branches of the service, finally in the air force, where he lost an eye in combat. D’Annunzio was fond of bold, individual military actions. Two of his best known came in 1918: his flight over Vienna (volo di Vienna), where he dropped thousands of propaganda leaflets over the city, and his prank at Buccari Bay (beffa di Buccari), a daring surprise attack on the Austrian fleet with powerboats.

In 1919 D’Annunzio and about 300 supporters, in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, occupied the port of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia), which the Italian government and the Allies were proposing to incorporate into the new Yugoslav state but which D’Annunzio believed rightly belonged to Italy. D’Annunzio ruled Fiume as dictator until December 1920, at which time Italian military forces compelled him to abdicate his rule. Nevertheless, by his bold action he had established Italy’s interest in Fiume, and the port became Italian in 1924. D’Annunzio was rewarded by the country’s Fascist prime minister Benito Mussolini with a title and a national edition of his works, but he exercised no further influence on Italian politics and was marginalized by the regime. He retired to Gardone Riviera in Lombardy and wrote some memoirs and confessions. There D’Annunzio built a stadium and displayed a ship half-buried in the hillside. After his death a large mausoleum was constructed there to contain his remains. Gardone Riviera became not only his monument but a monument to Italian nationalism and one of Italy’s most visited tourist sites.

D’Annunzio’s colourful career, his scandalous amours, his daring in wartime, his eloquence and political leadership in two national crises, all contributed to make him one of the most striking personalities of his day. D’Annunzio’s literary works are marked by their egocentric perspective, their fluent and melodious style, and an overriding emphasis on the gratification of the senses, whether through the love of women or of nature. Apart from certain interesting autobiographical works such as Notturno (1921; published in Nocturne and Five Tales of Love and Death), D’Annunzio’s prose is somewhat tedious; he was too receptive of contemporary thought and style, so that his work was liable to indiscriminately reflect the influences of other writers. The same can be said of most of his plays, with the exception of La figlia di Iorio, which has powerful and vivid characterizations.

As a poet, D’Annunzio derived much of his power from his great emotional susceptibility. Already in Primo vere and Canto novo, he had shown an astonishing gift for rendering with precision and power the healthy exuberance and youthful intensity of a boy in love with nature and women. Though he then turned to morbid and decadent themes in his subsequent poems, he recovered the vitality of his inspiration and found a new, more musical form for its expression in the great work of his maturity, the Laudi, and especially its third book, Alcyone. Some of the poems in this book, in which D’Annunzio proclaims his sensuous, joyful feeling of communion with nature, are among the masterpieces of modern Italian poetry.