D'Annunzio, Gabriele

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D'ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE

D'ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE (1863–1938), Italy's most important playwright and poet from the 1880s to World War I.

At age sixteen Gabriele D'Annunzio published his first book of poems, Primo vere (In early spring). Initially, he was influenced by Giosuè Carducci, but his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche responded to a self-image of tragic heroism, a cult of oneself, and the cultivation of basic passions. The D'Annunzian hero was a superior being who dominated the mass of humanity. Starting in the 1890s D'Annunzio published a series of dramas (Dead City, The Flame, The Daughter of Jorio, The Ship, Glory, Beyond Love, and Fedre) that confirmed his status as Italy's major playwright. The poet also gained equal fame for his scandalous love affairs with leading actresses, most notably Eleonore Duse.

D'Annunzio entered politics during the turbulent decade of the 1890s. These years were marked by banking scandals, Italy's defeat in Ethiopia in 1896, and protest against the rising cost of living followed by the imposition of martial law in May 1898. Elected initially as a right-wing deputy to Parliament in 1897, D'Annunzio proclaimed a new kind of aesthetic politics: "The fortune of Italy is inseparable from the destinies of Beauty, of which she is the mother…. The Latin spirit cannot reestablish its hegemony in the world without reestablishing the cult of One Will" (Witt, p. 36). In March 1900 D'Annunzio, dubbed the "deputy of beauty," confirmed his reputation for theatrical politics by walking from the benches of the extreme right to the far left with the explanation, "I go toward life." His experience among the Socialists was relatively brief. By the end of the decade he took up positions close to the far right imperialist Italian Nationalist Association and published a collection of poems, Canzoni della gesta d'oltremare (Song of deeds beyond the sea), justifying Italian expansion. In 1910 D'Annunzio fled his creditors in Italy and took up residence in Paris, where he staged The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, with music by Claude Debussy.

D'Annunzio's blend of aesthetics and politics appealed to those who were impatient with the mundane struggle to build the infrastructure of the new Italian state. He encouraged the belief that politics was an act of will by which a superior individual could shortcut the path to greatness and world power. The notion that politics could be reduced to style over substance, to rhetoric over achievement, proved alluring to young intellectuals who chafed at the seemingly base political deals and cautious foreign policy that marked the many governments of Giovanni Giolitti from 1903 to 1914. The poet moved center stage in April and May 1915, when he returned from France to lead the mass demonstrations to bring Italy into the war on the side of the Entente powers (Britain, France, and Russia). Arrayed against him in favor of continued neutrality in the Great War were the parliamentary majority, controlled by the former prime minister Giovanni Giolitti, the Catholic Church, and the Italian Socialist Party. Italy's entry into the war in May 1915 against the will of these powerful institutions confirmed the notion that determined elites could overcome the passive majority.

D'Annunzio volunteered for service in World War I. With a flair certain to capture the popular imagination he undertook several aerial missions over enemy territory, the most notable in August 1918, when he dropped leaflets urging surrender over Vienna. His romantic stature was enhanced by the loss of an eye on one of these flights. In 1919 D'Annunzio, at the head of a group of veterans, right-wing nationalists, and some revolutionary syndicalists, seized the disputed city of Fiume, which both Italy and the new Yugoslav state had claimed at the Paris Peace Conference. With this rag-tag army D'Annunzio held Fiume from September 1919 to December 1920, when a resolute government headed by Giovanni Giolitti finally ousted him from the city. Briefly, in 1919 and 1920, it seemed that D'Annunzio, not Benito Mussolini, would lead the movement to overthrow the Italian parliamentary state, but it soon became clear that D'Annunzio was incapable of the kind of sustained leadership that could mount a successful coup.

With the advent of Mussolini's government D'Annunzio retired from political life, accepted a gilded exile in a villa at Gardone di Riviera, and in 1924 was nominated to the Italian Senate.

See alsoItaly.