their façades from the outside only, but in many of their grounds he was free to wander. Topiary, fountains, cypresses and obelisks echoing each other’s forms; broad, curved steps; pergolas draped with wisteria; marble benches supported by carved lions: these gardens were marvellous places. He stored them away in memory to feed his imagination for years to come. He took his women into them on summer nights, to carve their names onto mossy stone parapets, to kiss, to hear the nightingales, and on at least two occasions that we know of, to strip off all his clothes and make love.
Those gardens, like landscapes glimpsed in a dream, were under threat. ‘We must build Italy in Rome,’ declared Francesco Crispi, the nationalist statesman who was to dominate Italian political life for the next two decades. Every open space was a target for speculators. The Aventine and Gianiculum Hills were being divided up into lots for sale. The Corso Vittorio Emmanuele was being driven through the city centre, at the expense of a swathe of mediaeval and baroque alleyways. Within months of d’Annunzio’s arrival in the capital, Augustus Hare, an English resident, wrote that in twelve years the new regime had ‘done more for the destruction of Rome, with its beauty and interest, than the invasions of the Goths and Vandals’.
D’Annunzio was to become, once fame gave him influence, an energetic conservationist. It is, for instance, largely thanks to his advocacy that Lucca still has its mediaeval walls. As a young journalist though, all he could do was lament the desecration. Parks ‘where, last spring, the violets appeared for the last time, as numerous as blades of grass’, were covered with white hillocks of plaster and piles of red bricks. In groves where nightingales had sung undisturbed for centuries ‘the wheels of wagons screech. The cries of artisans alternate with the hoarse yells of carters.’ The laurels of the Villa Sciarra, whose grounds had been sold for development, ‘lie felled, or stand, humiliated, in the little gardens of stockbrokers and grocers’. In the gardens of the Ludovisi family’s magnificent Villa Aurora, to be sacrificed to the apartment blocks of the newly widened Via Veneto, he saw ancient cypresses uprooted, their blackened roots ignominiously exposed to the sky. A wind of Barbarism was blowing over Rome, he wrote. ‘Even the box hedges of the Villa Albani, which appeared as immortal as the caryatids and the herms, tremble at the presentiment of the market and of death.’
That wind was a metaphor for the influx of middle-class officials and tradesmen and businessmen who had followed the new Italian administration into the city. In Rome in the 1880s, d’Annunzio’s fervent patriotism, which might have led logically to joy at Italy’s recent liberation and devoted loyalty to the regime running the unified country, came into conflict with his artistic sensibilities. The culture that he credited the aristocracy with having kept alive was in danger of being engulfed by ‘today’s grey democratic flood … which is drowning in meanness so many beautiful and rare things’.
He wasn’t uncritically admiring of the aristocrats he gradually began to meet. But, debauched or silly though the upper-class characters in his novels may be, they still have graces denied lesser beings. D’Annunzio’s imaginary Count Andrea Sperelli, standing ‘on guard’ at the beginning of a duel, displays in every line of his person the ‘sprezzatura of a great lord’. In another novel, d’Annunzio describes a refined young man’s revulsion on seeing his bourgeois mistress’s bare feet. They seem to him deplorably vulgar, suggestive of squalor and meanness. Even the curve of an upper-class instep was somehow more noble than that of a plebeian.
On that school outing to Poggio, d’Annunzio had gained access to a grand house by ingratiating himself with the girls. In Rome as an adult he played the same game. In the fencing schools and stables he encountered the young men of the upper classes; he saw them striding, immaculately dressed, up the steps of their clubs; he might share a compartment on a train with them; but he was not one of them. He was a brave horseman, but it would be another twelve years before he became a member of the Circolo della Caccia, the exclusive fox-hunting club. Women, however, were more approachable. Scarfoglio took it for granted that d’Annunzio’s enthusiasm for high society was sexually motivated. ‘As winter opens the doors of the great Roman houses, so he ceded to the flatteries of ladies.’
The three or four streets between the Piazza di Spagna and the Corso – then full of antique shops and jewellers – were his hunting ground where, as he tells it, open-air ‘flirtation’ (his English) was rife. In a teasing piece for La Tribuna he described the erotic opportunities shopping afforded. ‘Your hand can brush furtively against a lady’s, in feeling an embroidered silk.’ Advice on the choice of a Christmas present, he explained to his readers, can have ‘an infinity of madrigals’ as its subtext. ‘You can tell her you have seen an unusual object in a little-known curio shop and offer to accompany her there, and as the two of you bend over to inspect the knick-knack in question you will feel your ear tickled by her hair.’ And then, a little later, you can play on the memory of that intimacy. ‘“Do you remember Duchess … You were wearing a chestnut-coloured mantle trimmed with chinchilla, and you were so fair, at Janetti’s shop, standing in a ray of sunlight, between a piece of marquetry and a screen of leather tooled with silver and rose-coloured chimeras … You were so beautiful that morning … And you were so kind … and sweet … etc. etc. Do you remember?” If the Duchess remembers, you’ve almost certainly made a conquest.’
It is not hard to guess of whom he was thinking. In April 1883, a couple of months after he wrote his last letter to Elda, d’Annunzio attended a gathering of high-ranking ladies in the Palazzo dei Conservatori. The piece he wrote is his usual confection of artistic references, fashion notes and social gazette. He mentions the Duchessa di Gallese, serene in crushed velvet, and notes that she smiles frequently at her blonde daughter, Maria, who stands by a marble statue and wears a white plume. D’Annunzio ends the piece with an enigmatic reference to a pair of ‘living turquoises speckled with gold’ beneath long eyelashes. In his scandalous poem, Peccato di Maggio (Sin in May) published the following month, he describes seducing a young woman with just such eyes. Shortly thereafter he and Maria di Gallese eloped.
He wrote to Nencioni: ‘Finally, I have given myself up entirely to love, forgetting myself and everything else.’ The Duchessina Maria Hardouin di Gallese (pictured overleaf with their son Mario) was a year younger than him, described by a contemporary as ‘a graceful creature, fragile, an eighteenth-century pastel … the image of poetry’.
The family bore a noble name, but neither of Maria’s parents was born into the ancient aristocracy. Her father was the son of a clockmaker from Normandy, who had come to Rome as a junior officer in the French army in 1849. Billeted in the Gallese palace, or perhaps just frequenting the stable yard, he had met, wooed and won the widowed duchess, marrying her and – thanks to a special papal decree – sharing her title. When she died he married again, to a much younger woman of the bourgeoisie. But however come by, the duke’s title was ancient and respected; his home, the fifteenth-century Palazzo Altemps, was imposing; his second wife, Maria’s mother, was a court insider and lady-in-waiting to the Queen.
Persistent gossip suggests that it was the duchess who first became interested in d’Annunzio. She was described by her neighbour, Count Luigi Primoli, who would become a good friend of d’Annunzio’s, as ‘graceful, seductive, but as hysterical as the heroine of a novel’. Primoli adds that she was constantly going about with poets. In her salon writers and artists met high society. This was the kind of inclusive circle into which d’Annunzio could have been invited. Or perhaps he met mother and daughter with Primoli, who also made a practice of inviting ‘the two aristocracies, of the mind and the blood’, to meet. D’Annunzio certainly visited his house at about this time, and wrote fondly of a ‘mysterious corner’ where a little low divan in a heavily curtained alcove, half screened by a palm tree, provided the perfect place to ‘converse in peace with a lady’.
Whatever may have passed between d’Annunzio and the duchess, he soon transferred his interest to her daughter. Count Primoli, recounting the affair in his diary, imagines Maria finding him in a corner of the palace. ‘A young poet … as beautiful as a mediaeval page. Was he there for her mother? She took him for herself.’ It wasn’t difficult for the young couple to meet. Later, Maria wrote nostalgically to Primoli of how