roars up and down the lake in it (and catches a bad cold). Next, dismantled and transported on over twenty flat-bed railway trucks, comes the forward half of a battleship, the Puglia. Offloaded at the railway station in Desenzano and laboriously transported piecemeal along the lake shore and up the mountainside to d’Annunzio’s fastness, it is there reassembled. Set in concrete, its missing rear recreated in stone, it juts out from the side of the cypress-covered slope above d’Annunzio’s rose garden as though breaking through a petrified wave. The gift comes complete with a set of real live sailors, whom d’Annunzio drills on deck.
And now we can see d’Annunzio with our own eyes. On YouTube we can watch a Fox Movietone newsreel showing a little party he gives on the Puglia’s deck soon after its installation. Proceedings open with the tolling of a great bell. Then comes a six-gun salute, smoke from the ship’s cannon cloaking the hillside. The host appears on deck, in military uniform with a chest full of decorations, smilingly escorting some ladies in cloche hats. A string quartet plays: d’Annunzio listens attentively (the camera politely staying on the side of his good eye). He is stouter now, and slightly stooped. He plays a few notes on a clarinet. Cut. Now d’Annunzio is cackling merrily, revealing that he is almost toothless. People are often surprised – given the total humourlessness of his writing – to find how playful he can be. He has been invited to recite some verse for the film crew. He waves his hands and gabbles, amidst more laughter, the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno, before turning back to his female friends.
Only three years before his own accession to power, Mussolini wrote to d’Annunzio suggesting the overthrow of the Italian monarchy and the establishment of a ‘Directory’ with d’Annunzio as president. It was d’Annunzio who was the Duce then, while Mussolini was content to act as his enforcer. Now d’Annunzio is a lost leader. Throughout the 1920s there will be people looking to him to exploit his immense public following and give them a lead: fascists dismayed by the compromises Mussolini makes on his way to consolidating his power; anti-fascists who believe the poet could become the figurehead of a less brutal regime. They look in vain.
September 1937. The railway station in Verona. Mussolini is on his way back to Rome after visiting his new ally, Adolf Hitler, and showing himself to the German people. D’Annunzio – vehemently anti-German all his life – has described Hitler to Mussolini as ‘a ferocious clown’. All the same, although he seldom leaves the Vittoriale now, he travels from Garda to pay his respects. He is seventy-four, and although he is still goatishly proud of his sexual prowess, he is dreadfully aged, by time, but also by syphilis and by the quantity of cocaine he has been taking.
A newsreel, here described by d’Annunzio’s French biographer Philippe Jullian, records the occasion: ‘D’Annunzio, on the arm of the architect Maroni, shuffles along the red carpet up to the carriage window, through which the Duce is leaning. With the smile of an ogre, Mussolini takes the poet’s hand in his.’ Mussolini, descending from the train, makes his way towards a balcony from which he is to address the assembled crowd. ‘The little old man toddles after him, chattering away and waving his withered hands in the air; Mussolini, without slowing down, smiles down at him from time to time, but the ovations of the crowd prevent him from hearing a word of what d’Annunzio is saying.’ Eventually the Duce pushes brusquely ahead, pointedly not inviting d’Annunzio to join him, leaving the poet to struggle back to his car through the oblivious crowd.
According to Mussolini’s spy at the Vittoriale, what d’Annunzio claims to have been trying to say to the Duce was: ‘I admire you more than ever for what you are doing.’ But Maroni, whom d’Annunzio trusts, reports that he returns to the Vittoriale in a state of acute depression, murmuring: ‘This is the end.’ Five months later he will be dead.
JUST AFTER DAWN on Good Friday 1915, Fly, Gabriele d’Annunzio’s favourite among his several dozen greyhounds, died in a veterinary clinic in Paris. The poet had stayed up most of the night while Fly leaned trembling against him, one of her legs so swollen she couldn’t lie down. Eventually the vet declared that he must ‘liberate’ her. While he did so d’Annunzio walked the streets. It was a public holiday, the most doleful festival in the Christian calendar, and Paris was anyway three-quarters empty: most of the city’s well-to-do inhabitants had fled when the government decamped to Bordeaux the previous autumn. What few people d’Annunzio passed were all men in uniform, and wounded. He stopped at the window of a musical instrument shop to admire some violins (as a connoisseur of music and of fine workmanship he was very interested in the luthier’s craft). Their delicate lines, their gilded darkness, reminded him of his dear dog.
Back at the surgery, the attendant uncovered Fly’s body for him. Her eyes, always before so adoringly fixed on him, were ‘blackened slots’. He had the corpse wrapped in cotton wool, then in a linen sheet, then in red damask, and finally laid in a white lacquered casket. As the workman nailed down the lid he remembered how much Fly had feared being alone in the dark. With the coffin in the back of his car he drove very slowly out to the farm near Versailles where his more-or-less-discarded mistress, Nathalie Goloubeff, cared for his dwindling pack of hounds. Since France had gone to war many of them had had to be put down for lack of food.
The grave was dug. Nathalie laid a basket of forget-me-nots and ivy at Fly’s head. D’Annunzio’s notebook entry for that day is listlessly bleak: the crackle of machine-gun fire (they were very near the front); a cock crowing; smoke drifting. ‘The mole hills, pale-coloured like dried-out clay … this terrible life … the throbbing of the aeroplanes, Fly’s poor eyes already putrefying … a sadness beyond words.’ Afterwards d’Annunzio ate breakfast with Nathalie, whom he had followed to France five years earlier, and with whom he still sometimes passed delicious nights. They were quiet. D’Annunzio was watching the dogs, Fly’s children and grandchildren, and thinking of the hound’s svelte body beginning to rot underground.
D’Annunzio writes about his dogs with a tenderness he seldom displays in writing about his women. Within days he would part from Nathalie, never to see her again; his references to her in his subsequent writings are more irritable than elegiac. That day of muted private emotion fell in the middle of a month of whirling excitement in his public life. As he buried Fly in a spoiled field he was in the midst of burying a phase of his life of which he was tired, and impatient for the beginning of a new one.
Since the outbreak of war the previous summer he had been stalled, stuck in the wrong place, unsure of his role, feeling his age (he was fifty-two). But on 7 March 1915 he finally got around to looking at a letter he had received days before (recipient of enormous quantities of fanmail, he often left his post unopened for weeks, or for ever). The letter contained a photograph of a monument to be erected at the harbour town of Quarto, near Genoa, from which Giuseppe Garibaldi and his followers had embarked for Sicily. The Sicilian expedition was, and is, the most thrilling episode in modern Italy’s myth of origin. In 1860, without the sanction of any government, at the head of a troop of just over a thousand ill-equipped volunteers, Garibaldi landed in Sicily. Over the next few months he drove the armies of the Bourbon King of Naples out of southern Italy, beginning the process which would lead to the creation of a free and united Italy.
Garibaldi was as famously beautiful as d’Annunzio was notoriously odd-looking. Garibaldi was renowned for his asceticism and his absolute integrity: after making himself dictator of half of Italy he took nothing for himself but a sack of seed corn. D’Annunzio was an inveterate breaker of contracts and non-payer of debts who bought suits by the dozen and shirts by the hundred. But the two men had some important things in common, among them prodigious sexual energy and a detestation of the Austrians (for centuries overlords of much of Italy). In Paris in 1915, d’Annunzio was in contact with Peppino Garibaldi, the great man’s grandson, who was commanding a legion of Italian volunteers fighting alongside the French. D’Annunzio had been waiting for the right occasion for his return to Italy. The letter, which so narrowly escaped the waste-paper basket, gave him his opportunity.