General Gabriele D'Annunzio, Prince of Montenevoso (12 March 1863 – 1 March 1938), sometimes written d'Annunzio as he used to sign himself, was an Italian poet, playwright, orator, journalist, aristocrat, and Royal Italian Army officer during World War I. He occupied a prominent place in Italian literature from 1889 to 1910 and in its political life from 1914 to 1924. He had the epithets (The Prophet) and (The Poet): stems from the Latin , meaning a prophetic, divinatory, or inspirational poet.

D'Annunzio was associated with the Decadent movement in his literary works, which interplayed closely with French symbolism and British aestheticism. Such works represented a turn against the naturalism of the preceding romantics and was both sensuous and mystical. He came under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, which would find outlets in his literary and later political contributions. His affairs with several women, including Eleonora Duse and Luisa Casati, received public attention. In his politics, which evolved many times, he associated himself with socialism and the progressivist views of the political left, responding to the illiberal and reactionary policies of Luigi Pelloux, as well as with the Historical Far Left.

During World War I, D'Annunzio's image in Italy transformed from literary figure to national war hero. He was associated with the elite Arditi storm troops of the Italian Army and took part in actions such as the Flight over Vienna. As part of an Italian nationalist reaction against the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, he set up the short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro in Fiume with himself as Duce. The Charter of Carnaro made music the fundamental principle of the state, which was corporatist in nature. Although D'Annunzio later preached nationalism and never called himself a fascist, he has been credited with partially inventing Italian fascism, as both his ideas and his aesthetics were an influence upon Benito Mussolini. At the same time, he was an influence on Italian socialists and an early inspiration to the first phase of the Italian resistance movement to fascism.

Biography Early life and family

D'Annunzio was born in the township of Pescara, in the modern-day Italian region of Abruzzo, the son of a wealthy landowner and mayor of the town, Francesco Paolo Rapagnetta D'Annunzio (1838–1893) and his wife Luisa de Benedictis (1839–1917). His father was born Francesco Paolo Rapagnetta, the sixth child of Camillo Rapagnetta, a shoemaker, and Rita Olimpia Lolli. At the age of 13, he was adopted by a sister of his mother Rita, Anna Lolli, who had remarried, after the death of her first husband, a wealthy merchant and shipowner, Antonio D'Annunzio. D'Annunzio's paternal grandfather, Camillo Rapagnetta (1795–1866) registered his birth. Legend has it that D'Annunzio was initially baptised Gaetano and given the name of Gabriele later in childhood because of his angelic looks; this story is purely fictitious, as can be seen by D'Annunzio's birth certificate and baptismal records, which record Gabriele as both his birth and baptismal name.

D'Annunzio's precocious talent was recognised early in life, and he was sent to school at the Liceo Cicognini in Prato, Tuscany. He published his first poems – a small volume of verses called Primo Vere – in 1879, at the age of sixteen and while still at school. Influenced by Giosuè Carducci's Odi barbare, he placed some almost brutal imitations of Lorenzo Stecchetti, the fashionable poet of Postuma, side by side with translations from the Latin. His verse was so distinguished that the literary critic Giuseppe Chiarini, upon reading it, brought the unknown youth before the public in an enthusiastic article.

In 1881, D'Annunzio entered the University of Rome La Sapienza, where he became a member of various literary groups, including , and wrote articles and criticism for local newspapers. In those university years, he started to promote Italian irredentism.

Literary work D'Annunzio published (1882), (1882), (1883), (1884) and the greater part of the short stories that were afterwards collected under the general title of (1886). contains poems full of pulsating youth and the promise of power, some descriptive of the sea and some of the Abruzzese landscape, commented on and completed in prose by , the latter a collection of short stories dealing in radiant language with the peasant life of the author's native province. is the beginning of D'Annunzio's second and characteristic manner. His conception of style was new, and he chose to express all the most subtle vibrations of voluptuous life. Both style and contents began to startle his critics; some who had greeted him as an enfant prodige rejected him as a perverter of public morals, whilst others hailed him as one bringing a breath of fresh air and an impulse of new vitality into the somewhat prim, lifeless work hitherto produced.

Meanwhile, the review of D'Annunzio publisher Angelo Sommaruga perished in the midst of scandal, and his group of young authors found itself dispersed. Some entered the teaching career and were lost to literature, others threw themselves into journalism. D'Annunzio took this latter course, and joined the staff of the , under the pseudonym of "Duca Minimo". Here he wrote (1886), a love poem, in which for the first time he drew inspiration adapted to modern sentiments and passions from the rich colours of the Renaissance. is also interesting because in it one can find most of the germs of his future work, just as in and in certain ballads and sonnets one can find descriptions and emotions which later went to form the aesthetic contents of , and (1892).

D'Annunzio's first novel (1889, originally translated into English as The Child of Pleasure and later, more accurately, as Pleasure) was followed in 1891 by Giovanni Episcopo, and in 1892 by L'innocente (The Intruder). These three novels made a profound impression. L'innocente, admirably translated into French by Georges Herelle, brought its author the notice and applause of foreign critics. His next work, Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death) (1894), was followed soon by (The Maidens of the Rocks) (1896) and (The Flame of Life) (1900).

D'Annunzio's poetic work of this period, in most respects his finest, is represented by (1893), the civic poem (1893), and (1900). A later phase of D'Annunzio's work is his dramatic production, represented by (1897), a lyrical fantasia in one act, and his (The Dead City) (1898), written for Sarah Bernhardt. In 1898 he wrote his and La Gioconda; in the succeeding year La gloria, an attempt at contemporary political tragedy which met with no success; and then Francesca da Rimini (1901), based on an episode from Dante Alighieri's Inferno which was declared by an authoritative Italian critic – Edoardo Boutet – to be the first real, if imperfect, tragedy ever given to the Italian theatre. It was adapted by Tito Ricordi to become the libretto for the opera Francesca da Rimini by Riccardo Zandonai, which premiered in 1914.

In 1883, D'Annunzio married Maria Hardouin di Gallese, and had three sons, Mario (1884–1964), Gabriele Maria "Gabriellino" (1886–1945) and Ugo Veniero (1887–1945), but the marriage ended in 1891. In 1894, he began a love affair with the actress Eleonora Duse which became a cause célèbre. He provided leading roles for her in his plays of the time such as La città morta (1898) and Francesca da Rimini (1901), but the tempestuous relationship finally ended in 1910. After meeting the Marchesa Luisa Casati in 1903, he began a lifelong, turbulent on-again, off-again affair with Luisa that lasted until a few years before his death.

In 1897, D'Annunzio was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for a three-year term, where he sat as an independent. By 1910, his daredevil lifestyle had forced him into debt, and he fled to France to escape his creditors. There he collaborated with composer Claude Debussy on a musical play, Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (The Martyrdom of St Sebastian), 1911, written for Ida Rubinstein. The Holy See reacted by placing all of his works in the Index of Forbidden Books. The work was not successful as a play, but it has been recorded in adapted versions several times, notably by Pierre Monteux (in French), Leonard Bernstein (songs in French, dialogue in English), and Michael Tilson Thomas (in French). In 1912 and 1913, D'Annunzio worked with opera composer Pietro Mascagni, writing the libretto for the opera Parisina, staying sometimes in a house rented by the composer in Bellevue, near Paris. D'Annunzio insisted that the entire, long libretto should be set to music, which eventually meant that the work was too long for audiences of the time and required the entire last act to be removed.

In 1901, D'Annunzio and Ettore Ferrari, the Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, founded the Università Popolare di Milano (Popular University of Milan), located in via Ugo Foscolo. D'Annunzio held the inaugural speech and subsequently became an associate professor and a lecturer in the same institution. In 1902, D'Annunzio visited Istria, an "irredent land", then under Austro-Hungarian rule. He was welcomed in Pisino by a "pouring of flowers" let down from the windows of the crowded houses, visited the Italian gymnasium and was paid a homage designed by the future wife of Francesco Salata. In a letter addressed to the same Italian historian, D'Annunzio complimented with him about the civility of the Italian population living there, praising the struggle of the "great, manifold, transfiguring Latin civilisation against the barbaric abuse".

D'Annunzio was a Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Italy, a Scottish Rite that in 1908 had separated from the Grand Orient of Italy. Subsequently, he adhered to the Christian mystic and philosophic movement known as Martinism, collaborating in Fiume with other 33rd degree Scottish Rite Freemasons and occultists like Alceste De Ambris, Sante Ceccherini, and Marco Egidio Allegri. The Masonic initiation of D'Annunzio is testified by the choice of Masonic symbols for the flag of the Regency of Carnaro, such as the Ouroboros and the seven stars of the Ursa Major.De Turris 2006, p. 44. and

World War I

After the start of World War I, D'Annunzio returned to Italy and made public speeches in favour of Italy's entry on the side of the Triple Entente, including the famous ("Quarto Speech"). Since taking a flight with Wilbur Wright in 1908, D'Annunzio had been interested in aviation. With the war beginning, he volunteered and achieved further celebrity as a fighter pilot, losing the sight of an eye in a flying accident.

In February 1918, he took part in a daring, if militarily irrelevant, raid on the harbour of Bakar (known in Italy as , lit. the Bakar Mockery), helping to raise the spirits of the Italian public, still battered by the Caporetto disaster. On 9 August 1918, as commander of the 87th fighter squadron "La Serenissima", he led nine planes in a round trip to drop propaganda leaflets on Vienna. This is called il Volo su Vienna ("The Flight over Vienna") in Italian.

Fiume