The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

From that moment onward, according to Damerini, the Venetian people engulfed d’Annunzio in ‘a wave of anxious affection’. He had been a privileged visitor in aristocratic circles. Now he became, in Venice as he already was in Rome, the people’s idol. His admirers mobbed him. They hung around outside the Danieli hoping to catch a glimpse of him. When he went out on foot crowds followed him along the Riva degli Schiavoni. When he came back by gondola or in one of the recently introduced motorboats they pressed so thickly around the landing stage he could scarcely make his way ashore.

He had embarked on his new life as national hero, and the character in which he had done so was both archaic and up to date. In preferring the weapons of propaganda to those of material destruction he was displaying a quintessentially modern sophistication. He was a new-fangled PR man, but he was also a hero from the age of chivalry, one who had exchanged his charger for an aeroplane. As the British Prime Minister Lloyd George put it, ‘the pilots are the Knighthood of the Air, without fear and without reproach. Every aeroplane fight is a romance, every record an epic.’ In a war which was becoming, on its every front, more brutal and more gruesome, d’Annunzio with his beribboned leaflets, skyborn and dancing invulnerable through the enemy anti-aircraft fire, seemed gallant, joyous and debonair.

He returned to the Danieli. We do not know whether the Countess Morosini telephoned that evening as promised, but we do know that the next day she sent d’Annunzio a little silver box engraved with her name and the date of his exploit, and that he thanked her, saying that he would carry it always because the day it commemorated was more precious to him ‘than all my odes’. After having been for decades a self-described genius and one of the most famous people in Europe, he had begun what felt like a second, and more important existence. ‘All the past flows together towards all the future,’ he wrote. ‘All my life I have waited for this hour.’

It is time to turn back from that point, and to map some of the streams flowing through his life and mind towards it, to see how far back they rise, how variously muddy or silvery fresh their sources are, to observe how they join and braid together and diverge again before merging at last, and to trace how they eventually debouch into a sea of blood.

II (#ulink_7cb1ead4-c863-5063-a9bd-17c799653ac9)

STREAMS (#ulink_7cb1ead4-c863-5063-a9bd-17c799653ac9)

WORSHIP (#ulink_5ef53144-0648-5700-8326-e6167e5bc601)

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO – Gabriel of the Annunciation. Everything about his own name was delightful to the poet: the aristocratic particle, the scriptural associations, the way it marked him out as superhuman. He was an archangel, bringing revelations to the wondering world. The name (so felicitous that some of his contemporaries insisted he must have made it up) was his real one, or at least a family name to which he was genuinely entitled. His father had been born Francesco Paolo Rapagnetta, but when Francesco’s childless uncle d’Annunzio made him his heir he changed his surname by deed poll. His son took the prompt. On the back of the winged dining chair d’Annunzio used during his period of greatest fame and fortune were carved the words: ‘The Angel of the Lord is with us.’

D’Annunzio was not a pious man but he revelled in the trappings of Christian worship. He surrounded himself with lecterns and prayer stools and censers and alabaster stoups originally carved to hold holy water. His addresses to his political supporters were structured, like the liturgy, as a sequence of calls and responses. To him soldiers were martyrs and battered weapons were relics. He was an arch-sensualist, but he was also an ascetic. After visiting Assisi he discovered an affinity between himself and St Francis, and liked to dress in a friar’s habit (the penitential roughness of the garment mitigated by the fact he wore it over a shift of mauve silk).

In Fiume he staged pseudo-sacred ceremonies in the cathedral of St Vito, and encouraged a cult of his own personality so fervid that the Bishop of Fiume noted furiously that his flock were forsaking Christ for this modern Orpheus. His last years were devoted to the conversion of his house above Lake Garda into a self-glorifying shrine. He revered no one but himself, but reverence fascinated him. If a deity’s defining act is that of creation, then d’Annunzio – whose creativity was so exuberant that nothing but physical exhaustion ever slowed his pen – was god-like. He thought so. The hero of his novel Forse che sì, Forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No), crash-lands his plane on a beach in Sardinia and, alone in a wild landscape, reflects: ‘There is no God if it is not I.’

Faith shaped the culture into which he was born: faith in the Christian God and his saints; faith in magic. As an adult, d’Annunzio would embrace modernity and all its racket, but he grew up in a world where the sounds were made by sheep and cattle, creaking carts and rustling straw. The Abruzzi was, in the 1860s, and to an extent remains, a place apart. Blocked off by the Apennines from the great cities of Italy’s western seaboard, it is bounded by bald mountains, where bears and wolves still live, and in whose foothills walled towns perch on crags fluted like the underside of mushrooms. From there the terrain slopes gradually to the Adriatic, across which Abruzzese mariners have, for centuries, traded with their counterparts on the eastern, Dalmatian shore. The land is edged by low cliffs or, near Pescara, the region’s capital and d’Annunzio’s home town, by flat sand and pine woods (most of them now felled to make way for beachside hotels). Returning in middle age, d’Annunzio was moved to be back among the stone walls, the low hills scattered with flowering trees. ‘A painted cart passes along the shore, drawn by a pair of white oxen. The sandy soil sloping down to the sea is ploughed almost to where the waves break. Rows of beans. Vines contorted like arthritic old hands. A blackened stack of straw. Parsimony, diligence … The mountain rearing grand above.’

All of this (especially the parsimony) d’Annunzio would put firmly behind him. But though he left the Abruzzi in fact, in his fiction and memoirs it was ever-present. He liked to hear its dialect. In middle age, at the height of his fame, he hired a fellow Abruzzese to be the steward of his household. He sought out its landscapes. At Marina di Pisa during his years in Tuscany with Duse, and at Arcachon on France’s Atlantic coast during his ‘exile’, he chose to live by pine-fringed beaches resembling the Adriatic coastline he had known as a boy. He wrote about the place repeatedly. And the aspect of it which charged his imagination most potently was the religious life of its inhabitants, a phenomenon he found both repugnant and fascinating.

In remote villages the church was not only a place of worship, it was the community’s totem, on whose decoration much hard work and devotion and the peasants’ meagre savings were lavished. Troops of pilgrims passed along the country paths ‘in profile as in the embroideries of our old bedspreads’. During d’Annunzio’s childhood an itinerant priest, known to his followers as the Messiah, wandered the region, wearing blue tunic, red cloak and wooden clogs, and calling on the people to leave their crops and herds and follow him. Hundreds did so, singing and begging their way from town to town. ‘A wind of fanaticism’, wrote d’Annunzio later, ‘ran through the land from one end to the other.’

In the Abruzzi, houses are modest and great churches scarce. The most remarkable monuments in the region are the high mountain hermitages – caves or crevasses in which solitary mystics lived a thousand or more years ago and around which their devotees have, over the centuries, constructed precarious shrines. In defining the kind of stock he came from d’Annunzio borrowed their image. ‘I come from an ancient breed,’ he wrote. ‘My ancestors were anchorites in the Maiella … They flagellated themselves till the blood came … They throttled wolves; they stripped eagles of their feathers, and they scratched their seals on giant rocks with the nail Helen took from the Cross.’ Lacking – to his enduring chagrin – the kind of aristocratic antecedents he gave his fictional heroes, he awarded himself membership of another kind of elite, that of the ferociously holy.

D’Annunzio’s father, Francesco Paolo, was far from being an anchorite. He was a petty landowner and wine merchant. During Gabriele’s childhood he was the Mayor of Pescara, a prominent man in a provincial town. In d’Annunzio’s first stories, set in or around Pescara, he conjures up a place where the bustle of port and barracks and market are contrasted with the frustration of women confined to small, dark rooms, who watch the life of the street through chinked shutters or small high windows. The church bell clangs out the hours. Priests pass in the streets carrying extreme unction to the dying. Young people, strictly segregated as a rule, furtively press up against each other in the merciful darkness when the church lamps are extinguished in Holy Week to mark Christ’s passion. Funerals, the bier followed by long lines of hooded mourners, their faces covered all but a slit for the eyes, or processions of girls in sacrificial white on the way to their first communion, provide the town’s main spectacles.

The sacred is all-pervasive. In the bedroom Gabriele shared with his brother, the main item of furniture, other than the beds, was a prayer stool. On the wall hung lithographs of religious paintings by Titian and Raphael. In one of d’Annunzio’s novels, set in the Abruzzi, a woman lightly remarks that before she and her lover can enjoy an afternoon in bed they will have to hang veils over the numerous saints’ pictures on the walls. God and his representatives were all around the boy d’Annunzio, and they were not a comfort so much as a form of surveillance.

Francesco Paolo d’Annunzio was a man of the flesh – self-indulgent and corpulent. In later life d’Annunzio was repelled by him (not least because he saw his father’s disorderly love life and compulsive overspending as a horrible caricature of his own); but in childhood he yearned to please him. Francesco Paolo’s extravagance could seem grand. During carnival he would stand on his balcony and, as custom demanded, toss handfuls of gold and silver coins down to the revellers in the street, deeply impressing the small son who would, in his turn, spend most of his life throwing his money away. Francesco Paolo liked a show and he liked to astonish (both attributes Gabriele inherited). He used to colour his white doves with the new-fangled aniline dyes, and released them to fly – pink, green, purple, orange – around the house’s inner court.

Gabriele was his parents’ darling. His father used to watch him gravely. ‘He never made light of me, nor ever mocked me.’ He had a brother (who became a musician and a swindler, before emigrating to America) and three sisters. But he was the prodigy, the little prince. He adored his mother, Luisa de Benedictis, mainly, as he tells it, because of the gratifying way she adored him: ‘Her glances made my heaven.’

The house was full of women – maids, his sisters, unmarried aunts, his grandmother – and he was everyone’s precious treasure. When ladies came to visit his mother he would sit on his own little stool in the middle of their circle, while they gazed at him admiringly as at ‘a rare beast’. Sent away to boarding school at the age of eleven, he wrote nostalgic letters home in which he conjured up luminous images of his early childhood, scenes that might have been lifted from accounts of the infancy of saints. ‘Do you remember how when I was little I used to come first thing in the morning into your room all sparkling with joy, and I used to bring you flowers? … No shadow of a cloud ever troubled my happiness.’

Actually, there were shadows. To live in the countryside (as the d’Annunzio family partly did – they had a second house, the Villa Fuoco, on their land outside town) was to be exposed to gory realities. Many of the stories d’Annunzio related about his childhood concern dying animals. There was the death of his little Sardinian horse, a bay with a white muzzle named Aquilino, whom he would feed with apples and sugar lumps in the peace of the night-time stable. There was the quail the farm manager gave him in a cage made of twigs. Half a century later d’Annunzio could still recall how the tiny creature dashed itself against its makeshift bars, gashing its head until the bone showed. On killing days the howling of the stuck pigs and their blood spurting into basins so appalled him that he would hide in a corner, face to the wall, his hand over his contorted mouth. ‘Life scared me as though it stalked me with a pig-sticking knife in hand.’ After the ‘massacre’ he sobbed all night.

Gabriele’s education was begun by a pair of devout, unmarried sisters whom he was to cruelly traduce in a story of disease and sexual desperation – The Book of the Virgins (later reworked as The Virgin Orsola). The passage in which he describes the two women’s lessons in reading, writing and religion sounds like actual experience recalled. ‘In solemn voices they spoke of sin, of the horrors of sin, of everlasting punishment, while all those wide eyes filled with amazement and all those small pink mouths opened aghast. In the vivid imaginings of the children, objects came alive … the Nazarene, bound with thorns and bloody drops, gazed from every side with agonised, haunting eyes, and beneath the great hood of the chimney each plume of smoke took on an atrocious form.’ Other children elsewhere might be terrified by the scissors man, the big bad wolf, or the fierce bad rabbit, but for d’Annunzio and his fellows, the bogeyman was one and the same with the deity.

Luisa was socially a cut above her husband. She would take her son to stay with her parents down the coast in Ortona. Their house, a rambling old structure wedged between the monastery and the fortress, was a complex of massive walls and hidden courtyards, of long corridors and cell-like rooms. As a tiny crawling child, d’Annunzio was fascinated by the floor tiles with their depictions of flowers and animals. Once upright and talking he would demand accounts of the fables illustrated on the ceramic panels let into the whitewashed walls.

The most wonderful part of his sojourns in Ortona were his visits to another relative, an abbess. She fed him with little twisted biscuits called ‘vipers’. When she told him she would teach him ‘glorious mysteries’ and gave him an amethyst rosary to hold, Gabriele, who was to become an insatiable collector of holy trinkets, and an inventive stager of pseudo-religious ceremonies, began to hyperventilate with excitement. Even more thrilling, she allowed him, as a favoured nephew, to pass through the visitors’ parlour into the convent. There in the secrecy of her cell, he watched her practising ‘her arts of divination’. He was nine years old, a boy in a place no male should ever have been permitted to enter, assisting at rituals forbidden by the Church. In a confused but ecstatic awareness of the multiple transgression, he watched while she threw aromatic herbs on the fire and peered at the homely ingredients of her spell, ‘the innards of a mullet, iridescent fish scales, sage leaves’. For all her neat wimple and nun’s bands, the old lady was a sorceress. He was afraid of her. She took his hands, and explained that his past and future were written on their two palms as a sacred story might be painted on a diptych. The room was full of smoke. Kneeling, arms outstretched, the sleeves of her habit hanging like sails, the Abbess seemed to go into a trance. Gabriele panicked. Beating frantically at the door he yelled until a novice appeared and released him.

Sorcery and divination had penetrated the convent walls. Outside they were ubiquitous. The people of the Abruzzi might be church-goers and observers of fasts and festivals, but Christianity coexisted in their culture with heathen magic. D’Annunzio witnessed cacophonous ceremonies when the frenzy of the ‘possessed’ was aggravated by a din of yells and whistles. In one of his stories a woman of Pescara seeks out a witch doctor, a bearded old man who rides into town on a white mule, wearing gold triangles in his ears and with silver buttons as big as the bowls of spoons on his coat. He is said to be able to make the blind see, and calm those possessed by wicked spirits. His wife, with whom he lives in a cave outside town, is an abortionist. In other stories d’Annunzio writes about an unsuccessful fisherman who believes himself to be cursed, about a dead dog, putrid and stinking, left across the door of a hut at night to keep away vampires, about a child dying as its mother declares it has been bewitched. Some of these magical practices he filched for his fiction from his friend, the folklorist de Nino. Others he observed as a child.

The Abruzzi is sheep country. Green roads, like rivers of grass, lead from the high mountain pastures down the long, long incline to the sea. D’Annunzio’s poem about the shepherds, who would bring their flocks down them annually ‘in the footsteps of ancient fathers’, was written long after he had ceased to return home with any regularity, but when he was a child their transhumance would have been one of the great public events of the year, marking the season as clearly as the harvest or the ripening of the first cherries. Those shepherds, and the peasants who farmed the coastal plain, preserved intact a rich cache of beliefs and ceremonies. D’Annunzio describes the endlessly repetitive, mournful chant which accompanied every solemnity from birth to death: the travelling songs sung in parts by groups of men and women on the road together ‘like a wave continually rising and falling’. He records a ritual which is still extant in the villages of the Abruzzi. ‘A white ox, fattened by a year of abundant grazing, caparisoned in vermilion, ridden by a little boy, processes in pomp to the church between banners and candles … arriving in the centre of the nave, it lets fall its droppings; in the heap of steaming matter the devout read the agricultural auspices.’

D’Annunzio described the elaborate praise-singing that was customary at harvest time. Lines of women, laden with food and wine in tall, painted jars, would process out into the fields, lauding the sun and the landowner and God as they went. When the men heard them coming they would lay down their scythes, and the foreman led the prayer – ‘inflamed with enthusiasm, he expressed himself spontaneously in couplets’ (this improvised rhyming is well documented) – and the rest of the gang roared out their responses ‘while the red light of sunset flashed reflected off the iron blades, and the topmost sheaf on the corn stook glittered like a flame’.

The child saw, and the man remembered, how a group of people could be bound together and excited by the power of the word.

D’Annunzio felt the lure of Christian devotion. During his recurring bouts of depression he would crave the peace of religious seclusion. So too he had his private rituals and a predilection for magical thinking. At birth he narrowly escaped being choked by the caul. Those so born were believed to have the second sight, and the caul itself was a charm which could save its wearer from drowning. D’Annunzio’s was preserved in a little package of silk hung on a cord which, as a child, he wore always around his neck. Recalling this as an adult, he wrote patronisingly about the ‘superstition’ of the women – his mother, aunts and nurse – who believed in its efficacy, but, throughout the Great War, whenever he went into action, he carried an amulet or two in his pocket.

He was always a ditherer. Frequently, when faced with a decision, he resorted to primitive forms of divination. He opened books at random and searched for messages in the first phrase he read (a practice he claimed to have taken from ‘the ancient priests of Cybele’). He looked for omens. Emeralds brought good fortune (both magically and – as it happens – practically: Eleonora Duse gave him two enormous emeralds, the pawning of which several times saved him from financial disaster). He visited clairvoyants, he consulted astrologers. He carried a pair of ivory dice in a little jewelled box with the Caesarean inscription ‘Alea jactae sunt’ (‘the dice have been cast’) and, when required to make a decision, would frequently allow the fall of the dice to make it for him. He abhorred the primitive religiosity of the peasants he knew as a child, but he took with him into his sophisticated adulthood many of the superstitions of the village society he had left behind.

When he was five or six years old, one of d’Annunzio’s sisters beckoned him aside and, opening her childish fist, showed him her treasure, an artificial pearl. At once he was seized by a craving for something similarly rounded and lustrous. There were swallows’ nests beneath the house’s eaves. He would steal an egg. He ran up to a top-floor room and out onto the narrow balcony, but he was too small to reach a nest. Going back indoors he found a bench and, struggling doggedly, dragged it out. Women at a window of the opposite house called out to him. He took no notice. He scrambled up onto the bench and thence onto the wrought-iron railing three storeys above the paved street below. Clinging to the slatted shutters, he groped upwards. The women called more loudly. Down in the street passers-by stopped. Shopkeepers came out to see what was going on, craning their heads upward. The little boy could hear a growing hubbub beneath him. He struggled to haul himself up, but his arms weren’t strong enough. Agitated swallows beat around his head.

Suddenly he was being gripped around the waist and dragged down. His parents were there, his mother trembling, his father pale and threatening to beat him. He was lifted back through the window and laid, faint and shaking, on a bed. In retrospect he saw them – mother, father, child – as a secular trinity. His aunts hung over him weeping, as the sorrowing Marys wept over the dead Christ. But the family’s communion was interrupted. The crowd now gathered in the street, believing the child to be dead, began on the chilling ululations customary at funerals. Gabriele’s father picked him up, and carried him, limp and white-faced, back out onto the balcony. The keening turned to shouts of joy.

Describing the incident in old age, d’Annunzio made of this, his first balcony appearance, a portent. He was marked out from childhood, so he asserted, for a public life. More pertinently, it demonstrates how religious imagery pervaded his imagination. One of his school reports describes him as ‘very unbelieving’. At sixteen he was enthusiastic about Paradise Lost and Byron’s Cain, both poems whose heroes defy God. He admired Darwin. He shocked his teachers (most of them priests) by ‘gross heresies’, suggesting that if the deity existed at all he was a ‘villain or an imbecile’ who has ‘created mankind to amuse himself by watching us suffer’. But, for all that, it came naturally to him to see himself as Christ, and his parents as Mary and Joseph. The public life of the people among whom he spent his childhood, their faith, their songs and prayers, their spells and festivals, became part of the furnishings of his mind.

GLORY (#ulink_19ac66c8-f0c4-562d-bff1-d464ccc28ea1)

TOWARDS THE END OF EACH AFTERNOON, when d’Annunzio was a child in Pescara, the paranze, the Abruzzese fishing boats with their wide sails the colours of oranges, or saffron or terracotta, would appear at the mouth of the river. One day when he was nine years old, Gabriele ran down to the quay to greet them. He had a friend on one of the boats who used to bring him gifts of cockles. Having received his offering, he carried it off to a niche in the dilapidated ramparts of Pescara’s fort, settled himself astride a rusty old cannon and began forcing open the shells with his pocket knife. It was hard. The knife slipped. He cut himself badly. Blood poured over his hand and down the cannon. He began to feel dizzy. His handkerchief was too small to use as a tourniquet. He cut off a sleeve of his shirt to bind up the wound. At once the bandage was soaked with blood.

The place was lonely and night was coming on. A goat’s head appeared over the ancient wall above him, regarding him with its mad, devilish eyes. He remembered that the vaults of the old arsenal were infested with spiders and that the local women used their webs to staunch bleeding. Trembling now, he made his way into the dark and ruinous chambers, yelling to scare off the horrid scampering things, cut down a web with his knife, and wrapped it around his bloody hand before staggering home half-fainting.

When, in middle age, he wrote his account of this escapade, d’Annunzio placed it in a splendid setting of distant mountains and fiery-coloured clouds. He cherished the scar on his thumb as ‘the indelible sign of my innate difference’. The essay in which he described the incident is entitled ‘The First Sign of a High Destiny’.

The images and stories of heroes surrounded d’Annunzio as he grew up. The main salon in the d’Annunzio family’s house in Pescara is decorated with a painting of Aeneas. In the background, Troy burns. Aeneas, undismayed, looks stagily outwards to the future, as he sets off to fulfil the great destiny his father Anchises has foreseen for him. So d’Annunzio was to be launched out into the world to fulfil his father’s ambitions.

He was growing up in an heroic age for Italy. The Abruzzi had been a part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled through the middle years of the nineteenth century from Naples by a Bourbon monarchy. Three years before Gabriele’s birth, Garibaldi led his thousand volunteers to Sicily and drove the Bourbon troops, who outnumbered them twenty-six to one, off the island. The King was nervous and vacillating. His officers were hopelessly demoralised. As Garibaldi swept on up through Calabria to Naples, the armies of the teetering monarchy changed sides, or stripped off their uniforms and ran for home. In one of his stories d’Annunzio recreates the scene, which he must have heard repeatedly described, of the day when the fort at Pescara was evacuated and ‘the troops scattered, throwing their weapons and equipment into the river’.

King Victor Emmanuel of Savoy came south at the head of his army to annex the regions Garibaldi had conquered. Francesco Paolo d’Annunzio was one of the delegation who travelled to his camp at Ancona to invite him to bring his troops into Pescara. When they did so, the King himself (shortly to assume the title of King of All Italy) passed a night under the d’Annunzio family’s roof. In their small way the family had assisted in the making of the Italian nation state.

It was the first age of mass reproduction. Prints of Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel adorned the walls of houses all over the peninsula, revered much as sacred paintings were revered. In d’Annunzio’s home they were juxtaposed with depictions of the exploits of classical heroes: it was as though the time for glorious deeds had come again. When Gabriele was seven years old the French withdrew their support for the Pope’s temporal power, and Victor Emmanuel’s troops marched into Rome. The state of Italy, independent and united, was complete. Years later d’Annunzio was to recall being wakened, after going to bed that September evening, by people parading though the streets with lighted torches, by raucous songs, fanfares of trumpets and cries of ‘Rome!’

When he was eleven, d’Annunzio was sent to a boarding school, the Royal College of the Cicognini at Prato, which was considered to be the finest in Italy. Francesco Paolo wanted him to be ‘Tuscanised’. The Tuscan dialect, the language of Dante and Machiavelli and Lorenzo the Magnificent, was to be the language of the new Italy’s elite.

The Cicognini is grand but grim. Behind its eighteenth-century façade lie long corridors, with vaulted ceilings and wrought-iron lanterns. There is a chapel and an elegant little theatre, but there is little to make a boy feel at home. Gabriele felt the misery of boarding-school children everywhere. In writing his recollections of his years there, he describes the college as his ‘prison’. He recalls the gloom with which he walked back through its ‘sad portal’ after the daily walk and the relief, on his few exeats, of escaping from its atmosphere of confinement and prohibition. He was not allowed back to Pescara, even for the long summer holidays, for four whole years.

Children obliged to fend for themselves in a loveless environment grow a shell around their hearts which can be hard to crack open later. D’Annunzio matured into an adult notably lacking in empathy, an exploitative friend, an unreliable lover and a negligent father, for whom people en masse seemed no more interesting than herds of cattle. Some at least of his emotional frigidity can probably be ascribed to his early banishment to school. At the time, though, he responded to his spartan treatment, not only dutifully, but with fervid enthusiasm and declarations of love. The mission that had been laid upon him, that of making a prodigy of himself, was one he accepted enthusiastically. In his first year he wrote to tell his ‘dearest Daddy’ he was top of his class. ‘Oh how sweetly these words flash from my lips, what joy I’m feeling now I have made your wish come true.’

Already, as a schoolboy, he was a passionate little patriot. He wrote, aged thirteen, that he had two missions: ‘To teach the people to love their country … and to hate the enemies of Italy to the death!’ The shrillness was not peculiar to him. Italy was an unstable new amalgam of regions with widely differing histories. Its peoples, whose dialects differed so markedly as to make them in many cases unintelligible to each other, were going to need to be taught to love it. Italian nationalism was both anxious and bellicose. The late nineteenth century was, for all Europeans, a nationalist age, but for newly forged, insecurely unified nations – Germany and Italy prominent among them – it was one where a simple loyalty to the state was linked to a complex web of quasi-religious, quasi-erotic impulses, among them the yearning for heroes to worship. For d’Annunzio those vaguely defined but extreme emotions coalesced around the idea of his own ‘high destiny’.

Francesco Paolo and Gabriele alike believed in that destiny. Aged fifteen, the son wrote to the father: ‘I love praise, because I know that you will enjoy praise offered to me; I love glory because I know that you exult to hear glory attached to my name.’

Glory, glory, glory: the word tolls through his adolescent correspondence. ‘He is entirely dedicated,’ reads one of his school reports, ‘to making a great name for himself.’ An early photograph shows a curly-haired teenager, his expression solemn, his eyes fixed. It is inscribed, in his own hand, with ‘To Glory’. His path there would be literary, but he prepared himself for it with the kind of self-punishing dedication that a religious novice might devote to asceticism, or a would-be soldier to physical training.

The standard curriculum was not enough. He learned to play the violin and the flute. He took singing lessons. He set himself holiday tasks – the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the compilation of a book of ‘observations’. When the signal was given for the end of evening study, and the rest of the boys prepared for bed, he went around collecting the others’ left-over lamp oil so that he could work far into the night. He wrote to tell his father he was top of the class again, adding, ‘If you knew what it had cost me to reach that position!’ He saw himself as a hero who bore the marks of his exploits written on his body. His left shoulder, he wrote later, was lower than the other, so many hours had he spent, as a growing boy, hunched over his desk.

When he was permitted to bypass an exam, he wrote to tell his mother how disappointed he was, ‘I am certain I would have taken first place.’ When he was sixteen he wrote six letters to his parents for Easter, one in Italian, the others in Greek, Latin, English, French and Spanish. The great book he felt certain he would write one day, was, he wrote, a ‘peak’ he would climb.

The College of the Cicognini was run on military lines. The boys wore smart little uniforms, turquoise trousers and tunics with frogging and epaulettes. They were students, but they were also toy soldiers. They were drawn up into two ‘companies’, each consisting of four ‘squads’, and well-behaved boys were honoured with officer status. In his second year d’Annunzio was made a ‘corporal’. Three years later he was promoted to the rank of ‘sergeant’ and in his last winter at the school he became ‘commandant’ (the title he would give himself at Fiume). The boys’ days were punctuated by drum rolls announcing the beginning and end of lessons and study periods; their exercise was drill, their excursions were route marches, their games were battles, their heroes were conquerors.

The study of the classics took up a high proportion of the students’ time. So it did at schools all over the Western world, but for an Italian child Latin literature and Roman history had a potent local significance. British schoolboys might be encouraged to cultivate the stoic virtues the Roman Republic had borrowed from Sparta, and to trace the similarities between Roman stoicism and late-Victorian stiff-upper-lippery. They might identify the British Empire with the Roman one, and, reading Macaulay’s Lays, compare the dogged courage of his Roman heroes with that of Britain’s own colonial officers. For Italian children no such imaginative effort was required. In Plutarch’s Lives, they found the stories of Italy’s own native heroes. Reading Ovid and Horace they were studying the poets whose genius constituted part of their own nation’s claim to greatness. Virgil’s Aeneid described the founding of the state which – after a hiatus lasting a dozen centuries – had newly re-emerged. Livy and Caesar told how that state had fought and conquered. Tacitus (this was especially pleasing) described how the Italians/Romans had defeated the Germanic peoples to the north, the forebears of the Austrians who had, in the boys’ parents’ and teachers’ lifetimes, ruled most of northern Italy. Towards the end of d’Annunzio’s life, Mussolini was to make a public cult of Romanità. To a child educated as d’Annunzio was, that cult was no artificially imposed construct, but a cluster of associations which had shaped his sense of history and his notions of virtue from the very beginnings of his intellectual life.