Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  4 OCTOBER 1924. The painters Guido Marussig and Guido Cadorin have joined d’Annunzio’s more or less permanent staff of craftsmen and artists. With Maroni they are busy transforming d’Annunzio’s rickety old house into a sacred space—part Franciscan, part Buddhist, part nineteenth-century decadent, entirely solipsistic. D’Annunzio announces in an open letter to the Province of Brescia that he is not interested in anything occurring outside the walls of his property.

  Now he writes to Cadorin, who is working on the “Room of the Leper,” which contains a coffin filled with earth from the cemetery at Fiume. Cadorin has produced to d’Annunzio’s order a painting entitled Saint Francis Embracing d’Annunzio the Leper. Cut off from the world, speaking to multitudes while himself unseen, d’Annunzio identifies with lepers.

  The dark little chamber is turning out to be frightfully expensive, for all its supposed Franciscan austerity. The walls and couch are covered with deerskin, which may have been easy to come by in the woods around Assisi in the twelfth century, but which, in the 1920s, is an extremely costly furnishing fabric. The skins are laced together with gilded thongs. Cadorin has made a black lacquered wardrobe decorated with paintings of some of d’Annunzio’s favourite motifs—a nude archer, a greyhound, a rearing horse, an aeroplane, a woman bound and naked.

  Writing to Cadorin, d’Annunzio addresses him as “Brother Guidotto” and signs himself “Brother Fire.”

  BETWEEN 27 DECEMBER 1924 AND 2 JANUARY 1925, tens of thousands of armed blackshirts rampaged through Italian cities, wrecking anti-fascists’ houses and breaking into the prisons to release their fellows. Further evidence linking Mussolini to Matteotti’s murder was made public. Salandra, the wartime prime minister whose support had seemed to legitimise the fascist government, went over to the opposition. The commanders of the militia told Mussolini that unless he broke the opposition, the fascist movement would do so without him. It was widely expected that the King would dismiss Mussolini and declare martial law.

  In this crisis Mussolini made a move to silence at least one potentially dangerous critic—he confirmed the contract declaring that the Vittoriale was a “National Monument.” This was perhaps the greatest of his gifts to d’Annunzio. Henceforward the cost of the building works on the property would be borne by the state.

  D’ANNUNZIO ACQUIRES A GRAMOPHONE. Initially its poor sound quality—“just barking”—seems “horrendous” to his fastidious ear, but he quickly grasps its potential. All his life he has sought out musicians; now he can have music night and day. Choral singing, issuing mysteriously from a hidden source, will greatly enhance the seduction scenes he stages in his oratory-cum-boudoir.

  30 DECEMBER 1924. Mussolini calls all deputies to return from their Christmas holidays by 3 January to hear him make an important speech.

  3 JANUARY 1925. He addresses parliament. He acknowledges, or rather boasts, that the violence now endemic in Italian life is the result of “a particular climate” that he himself has created. (So he denies his debt to d’Annunzio, that “climate’s” true originator.) “I declare that I, and I alone, assume political, moral and historical responsibility for all that has happened.”

  Like d’Annunzio defiantly advocating lynch law on the Capitol in 1915, Mussolini goes on: “If fascism has been a criminal association, I am the head of that criminal association.” He is effectively admitting to having murdered an opposition leader, and threatening to repeat the crime as often as he deems necessary. “Italy wants peace, tranquillity and calm industriousness, gentlemen.” He will grant Italy that peace “with love, if possible,” but, “when two powers clash and are irreconcilable, force is the answer.” He is laying claim to the dictatorship and announcing that he will defend it brutally.

  His speech is greeted with tumultuous applause and cries of “Viva Mussolini!” Farinacci strides across the chamber and shakes him by the hand. Prefects throughout the country are ordered to close down forthwith any organisation suspected of “undermining the state.” By nightfall, fascist militia and police are arresting members of opposition parties.

  JANUARY 1925. More presents for d’Annunzio are arriving from Mussolini. D’Annunzio is a small man who feels comfortable in confined spaces and cherishes precious objects that can be held in the palm of a hand. Mussolini, whose taste is always for the outsize, presents him regardless with Brobdingnagian souvenirs.

  First comes the MAS in which he carried out the “Buccari prank.” D’Annunzio will have a hangar for it built on the hill above his house.

  Then comes a seaplane in working order. D’Annunzio calls it Alcyone, after his own poem-cycle. General Diaz gives him more mementoes, the casings of several unexploded shells. D’Annunzio has some of them mounted on a bridge, the Bridge of the Iron Heads. The others are placed on plinths and columns around the grounds.

  Next comes the prow of the Puglia. Set into the steep slope, the demi-battleship looms over d’Annunzio’s rose garden like an alarmingly apt political allegory—the poet’s playground overshadowed by lethal might.

  2 FEBRUARY 1925. D’Annunzio is in his dining room, eating, and making notes. On the table are violets and narcissi, the first of the year. He meditates on the contrast between the soft loveliness of the ephemeral petals, and the hard, shiny durability of the enamelled peacocks.

  He is still troubled by hallucinations in his damaged eye, and his vision in the other is distorted. Flat planes appear to be sculpted in relief. Colours are oddly pronounced. He sees double: an object seen up close has its copy on the horizon, one in the distance has a duplicate looming close by. He is stoical about these annoyances, but one-eyed, he finds it hard to judge distances. Pouring a drink, he misses the glass and spills wine or water on his papers. This is something about which he seldom complains, but which may explain his preference for eating alone.

  He keeps Great Danes now, dogs as tall as his waist, whose names all begin with the same letters as his own—Danki, Danzetta, Dannaggio, Dannozzo, Dannissa.

  In the Vittoriale women come and go: an actress he knew in Paris, whom he entertains to a Franciscan-style supper of red and yellow beans, served in the Room of the Leper; the Italian film actress Elena Sangro, with whom he first made love in Rome in 1919 in the hectic weeks before his march on Fiume.

  29 MAY 1925. Mussolini visits the Vittoriale again. D’Annunzio has placed an inscription in the antechamber. “To the Visitor: Are you carrying the mirror of Narcissus?…Fit your mask to your face/But consider that you are glass against steel.” If a minatory message is intended, Mussolini ignores it. D’Annunzio takes him across the lake on the MAS. Mussolini keeps his mackintosh tightly belted, but manages to look politely entertained. In the evening a string quartet plays Beethoven and Debussy. After Mussolini leaves, d’Annunzio comes out onto a balcony and reads to an assembled crowd a telegram he and the Duce together have sent to the King, announcing their mutual regard. “So,” notes Rizzo in his next report, “the last hopes of those who had obstinately attempted to set the two patriots against each other vanish.”

  D’ANNUNZIO IS IN HIS GARDEN. He is lying on the grass. Around him are rocks from the battle sites, a captured Austrian machine gun, a stone lion from Sebenico, but his sight line is so low he sees only tiny flowers, blue, yellow and white, like those on which an angel might tread in a painting of the Annunciation. His dogs find him there. He orders them to lie down and gradually they quieten around him until man and dogs seem to be breathing in accord. From an upstairs window Luisa calls to him in Shakespearean English, “Come with a thought, delicate Ariel.”

  22 JUNE 1925. Mussolini announces that the entire nation must be “fascisticised.” He boasts of his own “intransigence” and declares that he will “ferociously implement” his “ferocious will.” Anti-fascist politicians and intellectuals are leaving the country. Those who stay are intimidated, bullied, or beaten up. Giovanni Amendola—the liberal journalist and politician who courageously published the evidence incriminating Mussolini after Matteott
i’s death—is beaten to death.

  1925. Throughout the summer d’Annunzio is expanding his estate. He buys a tower down on the lake. He sets Maroni to work on a grand portico, dedicated to his “parent” Michelangelo, at the entrance to his property. He buys another adjoining house, the Hotel Washington. In July his wife visits him (Luisa Baccara and her sister are packed off to Cortina for the duration of her visit). Other visitors, including Toscanini, come and go. D’Annunzio escorts them around his domain, which is by now famous for its eccentricities. He takes them on to the Puglia where the sailors parade for their inspection. Visitors of sufficient importance are honoured by the firing of the ship’s guns.

  october 1925. Mussolini announces his special contribution to political theory—the doctrine of totalitarianism. All opposition parties, unions and associations are banned: henceforward Italy is a one-party state. Five years earlier d’Annunzio and de Ambris finished drafting the Charter of Carnaro, with its corporations within which every citizen was to be contained. Back then Mussolini, still casting around for a political programme, was declaring: “I start with the individual and proceed against the state.” The state was “asphyxiating,” so he then thought, it “causes nothing but harm.” Now, exactly reversing his position, he delivers his tolling declaration of the death of individualism: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

  4 OCTOBER 1925. D’Annunzio, who has been complaining vociferously about the noise of the village’s church bells, makes a noise of his own, personally firing a twenty-one-gun salute from the Puglia to celebrate the anniversary of his bombing raid on Cattaro.

  The décor of d’Annunzio’s bedroom is finally ready. Black lacquer, gilded carving and blue-and-gold striped wallpaper provide the background to the usual superfluity of textiles and vases and figurines. In a marbled niche over the fireplace stands a gilded copy of an intensely erotic Greek stele of “Leda with the Swan.” The room is full of phallic symbols—columns and spears, ears of wheat and elephants’ tusks.

  NOVEMBER 1925. The party of the reformist socialists is proscribed.

  D’ANNUNZIO IS THINKING OF DEATH. He writes to Mussolini proposing a one-way expedition by airship to the North Pole. “Think of planting our banner in that inaccessible place, and remaining there, at the foot of the flagpole, watching, with unflinching eye, the victorious dirigible departing for the fatherland!”

  Mussolini ignores the death wish, takes the proposal literally and invites d’Annunzio to come to Rome to discuss it further. D’Annunzio doesn’t budge. He will never see Rome again. Instead of becoming an explorer-hero, he entertains one. The aviator Francesco Pinedo, who has accomplished the flight to Tokyo d’Annunzio himself contemplated in 1919, visits the Vittoriale, and adds the propeller of his seaplane to d’Annunzio’s collection of heroic hardware. Speeches, Alalàs and so much ceremonial firing of the Puglia’s guns that afterwards d’Annunzio has to apply to Mussolini for a further supply of gunpowder.

  IN DECEMBER 1925, Luigi Albertini—who has spoken out in print and in person against Mussolini—is sacked from the editorship of the Corriere della Sera. Mussolini declares that Italy is “in a situation of permanent war.” Alceste de Ambris is stripped of his citizenship and leaves for France.

  JANUARY 1926. Mussolini announces that this will be fascism’s Napoleonic year. Napoleon is one of his role models. He has even written a play about him. D’Annunzio, who has been a Bonapartist since his schooldays, has a shrine for Napoleonic memorabilia at the Vittoriale—Napoleon’s death mask, his hour glass and a snuff box he used on St. Helena, all displayed on a lectern whose base is a Roman eagle sculpted in travertine.

  The deputies of the Popolari Party attempt to resume their seats in Montecitorio. They are driven away by fascist guards.

  SPRING 1926. D’Annunzio is promoted to the rank of general. He celebrates by ordering himself three fine new uniforms, and high boots to go with them. When Mussolini makes a bellicose speech saying that the Austrians must be driven out of Alto Adige, d’Annunzio signals his agreement by firing twenty-seven rounds from the Puglia.

  Ida Rubinstein is performing The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian at La Scala in Milan, with Toscanini conducting. D’Annunzio, wearing his new general’s uniform, watches from a box.

  CLEMENTINE CHURCHILL MEETS MUSSOLINI and finds him “quite simple and natural, very dignified…[with] beautiful golden brown piercing eyes.” She is one of numerous women entranced by the muscular Duce, whose image is now omnipresent. Like d’Annunzio, Mussolini understands the political power of a picture. An estimated thirty million photographs of him, in 2,500 different poses, are in circulation.

  On 28 March he addresses 50,000 blackshirts at a hippodrome. The uniforms of these new “dark angels of the apocalypse,” the salutes, the songs, the incantatory exchanges between orator and crowd, all are in the style d’Annunzio set in Fiume. So are Mussolini’s death-besotted sentiments. “It is beautiful to live, but if it is necessary it will be still more beautiful to die.”

  OUT OF THE PUBLIC EYE, surrounded by his little court, d’Annunzio becomes playful. He teases. He sends himself up. He writes the following note to his cook:

  Dear, dear Albina, [he also calls her “Sister Sauce”]

  It is years and years since I ate a boiled egg cut into four.

  Yours is cooked to absolute perfection.

  It is sublime.

  When I was a child, I used to ask for the egg to be spread with a small amount of anchovy paste. I used to lick my fingers and sometimes I went so far as to swallow them up to the first joint. Tonight I experienced that divine ecstasy again. I slide under the table in a faint no woman will ever provoke in me.

  Albina, may you be praised for evermore. And shine in eternity in the Constellation of the Egg and Nebula of the Anchovy! Amen.

  7 APRIL 1926. A middle-aged Irish lady, Violet Gibson, shoots Mussolini at point-blank range on the Capitol. Turning his head aside to acknowledge some students who are singing Giovinezza (signature tune of the legionaries of Fiume—now the fascist anthem), he escapes with a slightly nicked nose. That afternoon, wearing sticking plaster, he makes another stirring speech. D’Annunzio urges his followers: “Remember always to dare.” Mussolini tells his to: “Live dangerously” and to follow the soldier’s code: “If I go forward, follow me. If I retreat, kill me. If I die, avenge me.”

  JUNE 1926. A state-funded Institute for the Publication of the Complete Works of d’Annunzio is founded: the volumes in question, all forty-four of them, are to be published by Arnaldo Mondadori (whom d’Annunzio, revelling in this new source of income, dubs Monte d’Oro—mountain of gold). This is immensely gratifying to d’Annunzio’s vanity. It will keep him happily occupied for the remainder of his life, editing, revising, collating, fussing over paper quality and page design.

  SEPTEMBER 1926. Paola von Ostheim, Princess of Saxe-Weimar, visits d’Annunzio at the Vittoriale. She first caught his eye twenty-one years previously, when she was in Rome for treatment of a damaged ear drum. Returning from the doctor after an agonising procedure, she was half-carried to her hotel room, passing by d’Annunzio, who was chatting in the corridor with a princely acquaintance. A beautiful stranger, faint and in evident pain, was a bait to which d’Annunzio could not but rise. She looked, he noted, as tender and long-legged as an antelope.

  He wheedled his way past the small crowd of her attendants into her room, where he feasted his eyes on her—“white rose and gold-flecked Murano glass”—as she lay barely conscious on the bed. He slipped away but sent her a little golden box with an invitation to visit him in Settignano. The Princess never took up the invitation, but now she publishes her memoirs, sends d’Annunzio a copy, and is invited to the Vittoriale. This time she accepts.

  She is picked up from the station by an aviator driving a huge red sports car, and taken at breakneck speed up the hill to the Vittoriale. Ushered into the Prioria’s cramped hallway she waits until a gust of Eau de C
oty announces the appearance of her host. White uniform. Flabby cheeks powdered white. Eyes damp and slightly shifty.

  In her account the Princess glosses over what follows, but d’Annunzio’s notes record their love-making in cruel detail. Her antelope-like legs are still beautiful, but the rest of her is so much aged he prefers not to see it. “My cunning in covering her torso with a gold shift, and hiding her face in the shadows of many cushions.”

  The Princess has brought him a marvellous offering: a gold clasp from Mycenae, a piece of ancient treasure which is also a delicate tribute to the author of The Dead City. In the morning she sends it to him by the hand of one of the “Clarissas.” He sends it back to her, in a golden box. She protests that she intended him to keep it. He returns it again, this time with a testy note. “Excuse me. I was in the bath. I do not—do you understand?—want this gift.”

  1926. Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s Jewish mistress, publishes her biography of him, Dux. She portrays Mussolini as a genius, the quintessence of Italian virtue, and a martyr. His body, when he was invalided home from the war, she writes, was like that of “Saint Sebastian, his flesh pierced as with arrows.” This is a conscious borrowing: Sarfatti knows d’Annunzio’s writing. She calls the poet the “Lord of Fiume,” the father of futurism and the originator of the “stormy gladiatorial attitudes” of virile nationalist literature.

  THE REFURBISHMENT of d’annunzio’s music room is complete. It contains fifteen columns—red marble, black marble, ebony—none of which have any structural function. They are arranged asymmetrically: their placement, according to d’Annunzio, is the concrete expression of a musical fugue. Atop them are varicoloured glass lamps in the shape of gourds or fruit baskets, made for d’Annunzio by Napoleone Martinuzzi, a master glass-blower from Murano whom he calls “Brother Nape.” Here the “Vittoriale Quartet,” a group of Venetian musicians whom d’Annunzio patronises, perform on their frequent visits.