Gabriele D’Annunzio (Pescara 1863 – Gardone Riviera 1938), born into a wealthy landowning family as Gabriele Rapagnetta, was schooled in Prato and studied from 1881 in Rome. He started his poetical career at an early age in the style of decadent aestheticism and would develop increasingly nationalistic policies in the course of his life, culminating in his power takeover of the Adriatic port city of Fiume in 1919. Both with his Romantic and decadent writings, and as modernist politician, D’Annunzio appealed to the late-19th- and early-20th-century quest for a cultural and spiritual regeneration of the modern Italian nation, an effort which Italian Fascism would thereafter cultivate by commemorating D’Annunzio as poeta-vate (poet-prophet).

D’Annunzio’s poems, novels and theatre plays are characterized by a literary aestheticism dedicated to a cult of beauty and quest for a spiritual and cultural regeneration of the people, positioning artists in the role of cultural guides, opposed to bourgeois vulgarity. The decadent poet D’Annunzio was a master in creating sublime sensations of artistic beauty. This literary aestheticism can be found in his early poem collections and short stories like Primo vere (1879), Canto novo (1882), Terra vergine (1882), L’intermezzo di rime (1883) and Il libro delle vergini (1884). But D’Annunzio became especially known for his autobiographical novel Il piacere (1889), L’innocente (1892), Il trionfo della morte (1894) and the collection Laudi (1896-1903), in which he introduced the figure of the Nietzschean superman-hero who, positioned between poetry and action, would guide humanity towards a freedom of spirit. In the following years, D’Annunzio’s work became increasingly political, with the publication of Il fuoco (1900) and the drama La nave (1907). In Notturno (1921), an autobiographical collection about D’Annunzio’s musings during his combat duties as aviator in the Great War and the loss of his mother, the decadent writer has himself become a superhuman hero-figure.

D’Annunzio’s work must be considered in relation to the unfinished Risorgimento of the Italian nation state, characterized as it was by his determination to keep the spirit of the 1860s, decade of revolution and independence, alive. In 1897, when he took a seat in parliament, his active political activity started; in 1900 he joined the Socialists. D’Annunzio’s political oratory, like his literary writings, was highly charged with aestheticism and mythical aspirations; early members of the Futurist avant-garde movement, including the Milanese Filippo Tomasso Marinetti and I vociani in Florence (the circle around the journal La voce), considered D’Annunzio Italy’s most modern politician.

In the pre-1914 period, D’Annunzio whipped up popular belligerence with a mix of a powerful literary style and mass speeches. A noteworthy example is his famous speech La Sagra dei Mille on 5 May 1915 at the Monumento ai Mille at Quarto, commemorating Garibaldi’s army of 1000 soldiers who had departed from this place to liberate southern Italy in 1860. It is often seen as a turning point in the campaign for Italian intervention in the Great War, later described by Mussolini as the moment of revival of the spirit of the nation. In a period in which nationalist rhetoric became more rational and futurist, this speech in contrast had successfully aimed to create mythical visions of an inspired struggle and heroic spirit of sacrifice, reinventing the myth of the Risorgimento.

The spirit of the revolution and regeneration of the nation was also kept alive by D’Annunzio as one of the main advocates of irredentism. Disappointed about the long European negotiations about the city of Fiume (Rijeka), D’Annunzio decided to annex the city himself in 1919. For 15 months he established a free state under an avant-gardist, corporatist and proto-Fascist constitution, the Carta del Carnaro.

After the annexation of Fiume, D’Annunzio spent the last years of his life in a villa in Gardone Riviera, given to him by Mussolini. Although he was honoured as hero of the Fascist state, the private correspondence between Mussolini and D’Annunzio shows a troubled relationship between the two.