formed by living aloe plants. When his father’s profligacy obliged the family to sell some land Gabriele watched the peasants, their dependants, crowding around his mother, as though around a queen going into exile. People brought offerings, a branch laden with apricots, a carafe of wine, a lamb. ‘Some of them knelt to kiss the hem of her dress. Others kissed my hands, bathing them with tears.’ Gabriele grew up with an expectation of deference. He would play with other children, but one of them later recalled that if anyone tried to question his leadership, ‘he would fire up, his face went red and three veins would swell visibly on his forehead’. At home in the Abruzzi he seldom met anyone to whom he felt socially inferior.
In Rome things were different. Later he was to write that the human race was divided into those superior beings who had the leisure and the capacity to think and feel and, on the other hand, those who must work for their living. He never doubted that he belonged by nature to the first class, but circumstances, to his great chagrin, consigned him to the latter. He was a hired scribbler, a hack. He couldn’t make enough by selling his poems alone. Soon, as well as reviewing books and music and exhibitions, and writing about shops and cafés and the best way to incorporate the newly fashionable Japanese knick-knacks into the décor of a European drawing room, he had become a gossip columnist, the kind of social parasite the snobbish narrator of Henry James’s Daisy Miller (James was also living in Rome at the time) calls a ‘penny-a-liner’.
Seven years after he arrived in Rome, d’Annunzio took himself off to Francavilla, and there, in six months, wrote his immensely successful first novel Pleasure. It recounts the amorous adventures of Andrea Sperelli, Count Ugenta. He loves first Elena Muti, a young widowed duchess, beautiful, wilful and depraved, who first signals her availability by asking Sperelli to buy her an enamelled death’s-head, and who loops her feather boa around his neck in a closed carriage and draws him wordlessly into her dangerous embrace. Abandoned by Elena, and vulnerable after being wounded in a duel, Sperelli subsequently falls in love with Maria Ferres, equally beautiful but high-minded and pure-hearted, a gifted pianist who succumbs to Sperelli’s seduction only after protracted hesitations and is ruined by him.
Into the novel went observations d’Annunzio had been recording as a journalist throughout those seven years. He describes a race meeting, a charity auction, a concert, the bustle around the antiquarian jewellers’ shops in the Piazza di Spagna. All these were venues where a writer obliged to work for his living could stand alongside the members of the otherwise so inaccessible upper classes. The great d’Annunzio scholar Annamaria Andreoli has noted the poignancy of the fact that Elena Muti is first seen from behind and below, as she mounts the steps of the palace where she is to dine. D’Annunzio, newly arrived in Rome, was the outsider on the pavement, watching those more privileged going through doors he was not invited to enter. And even when some of those doors began to open to him, they did so, not as to a welcome guest, but to a barely tolerated reporter.
The nobility were everywhere visible in Rome, even to those who would never get to know them. D’Annunzio saw carriages driving up and down the Corso, ladies lying back in them, heavily veiled and lapped in furs. In Spillman’s cake shop he listened in on a pair of princesses chatting ‘indolently’ as they bought bonbons, and noticed their headgear: ‘a tiny hat of black lace’; ‘an aigrette of ostrich plumes and heron feathers’. He went to the races and stood among the crowd, composing verses to the ‘goddesses’ in the stands: to the ‘unknown blonde Diana’ with the ‘hippopotamus husband’, whose marble-white arms were loaded with gold bracelets and half concealed by flower-patterned tulle; to the Amazon in the green dress and the red-plumed hat. At the opera he sat in the stalls and gazed up at the ladies in the boxes, taking fashion notes for his column. The Princess di San Faustino, in a ‘dress of palest blue, shading into sea green, flowing, almost transparent … over her bare shoulders a blonde beaver fur, trimmed with red satin … a half-moon of brilliants glittering on her high-piled hair’. The Countess Chigi-Londalori in white satin, ‘slender as the stem of a lotus’. The Princess di Sciarra and the Duchess di Avigliana, both in black brocade. The Countess Antonelli in a tight dress of turquoise-striped silk. And so on and so forth. Day after day, week after week, he poured out these lists of names and jewels and textiles, caressingly itemising the physical attributes and expensive accessories of women he didn’t know.
He was resentful when ladies kept their furs on in the opera house. ‘They don’t show the moon-pale arch of their shoulders.’ After the publication of Pleasure his public would assume that Sperelli was d’Annunzio’s self-portrait, but the lordly Sperelli is a very different person from the young reporter with a notebook, whose only chance of glimpsing a grand lady in evening dress is to peer up at her from the opera house’s stalls hoping that she’ll feel inclined to remove her stole.
On returning to Rome from the Abruzzi for his second winter in the capital, the nineteen-year-old d’Annunzio had himself measured for a suit of evening dress, and wrote to tell his father he was embarking on the ‘high life’ (his English). As a ‘penny-a-liner’ he would not have been accorded the same kind of welcome as better-entitled guests, but gradually he gained entry to the concerts, the balls, the ‘pique-niques’ (indoor events which began around midnight, but which featured oriental tents and forests of hot-house plants). He was working his way in.
Scarfoglio was shocked. D’Annunzio, who had arrived in Rome with a sheaf of neo-classical poems and high-minded realist stories, had transformed himself into a frivolous sycophant to the idle rich. ‘For six months he has been going from one ball to another, from a morning’s riding in the Campagna to a supper party at the house of some pomaded old idiot furnished with nothing more than a set of quarterings. Not one serious thought enters his head. He is a puppy dog on a silken string.’ One night when some of the Cenacolo were having an unpretentious, Abruzzese-style supper together, the two quarrelled. Scarfoglio was irritated by the way d’Annunzio cherished and protected his spotless white cuffs (laundry was expensive). D’Annunzio was seriously annoyed when Scarfoglio – probably deliberately – dropped some bread crumbs on the poet’s black suit.
There was a part of d’Annunzio that agreed there was something shameful about what he was doing. The need to earn his living was abhorrent to him, as it would always remain. ‘What craven humiliations, Elda … Here men are sold like cattle.’ But there was nothing wrong, in his opinion, with popular journalism. He wanted readers, plenty of them. Besides, when he wrote about shops and table settings and ladies’ hats, he didn’t feel he was demeaned by his subject matter. To Scarfoglio these might be trivia, but d’Annunzio was observing and recording aspects of life which delighted him.
He gave a lot of thought to clothes. The heroines of his novels have wonderful dresses, minutely described. For a walk in the garden, Maria Ferres wears a Fortuny-style pleated gown. D’Annunzio devotes two full paragraphs to the cut of its sleeves, and its ‘strange, indefinable colour’, like rust, or like the stamen of a crocus. He tells us about the sea-green ribbon around its waist, the turquoise scarab brooch with which the collar is fastened and the hat, wreathed in hyacinths, which completes the outfit. In doing so he alludes to the Italian primitives, and to two of his favourite contemporary painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. To him fashion was an extension of the visual arts. He saw no reason why the décor of a drawing room or a woman’s dress should not be considered as worthy of serious attention as a landscape or a painting.
High society was not just a pleasing spectacle. The ‘ancient Italic nobility’, wrote d’Annunzio in Pleasure, had ‘kept alive, from generation to generation, a family tradition of elite culture, of elegance and of art.’
Everywhere around him he saw monuments to that tradition. Rome is a palimpsest, and d’Annunzio was an indefatigable explorer of the ruins of its multi-layered past. He clambered across the temples and fallen arches of the forum. He rode over the outlying hills past convents and basilicas, and out into the Campagna with its outcrops of titanic masonry, its aqueducts and tombs. He wandered through the immense ruins of imperial palaces. He went from church to church, listening to music, making notes on the statuary. But what moved him most was not the Rome of the Caesars, or the Rome of the Popes (the two predecessors Italian nationalists had in mind when they talked about the capital of the new nation as ‘the third Rome’). The Rome