Atlas Obscura brings us a tale of sex, poetry and fascism with the story of Gabriele d’Annunzio. Read on, True Believers:
If it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it: Gabriele d’Annunzio reading. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)
It can be hard to reconcile the incredible charisma of Hitler written about in history books with recordings of his speeches in which he looks like a madman. Some might conclude that perhaps Germans didn’t notice how off-putting he was because his style of declamation was widely used at the time and has simply fallen out of fashion.
But Hitler’s speeches weren’t normal or spontaneous. Neither were Mussolini’s. Both of them were to a large extent imitating one man: an Italian poet named Gabriele d’Annunzio, who lived between 1863 and 1938. He was a war hero and famous libertine, and he essentially invented Fascism as an art project because he felt representative democracy was bourgeois and lacked a romantic dramatic arc.
D’Annunzio was a thrill-seeking megalomaniac best described as a cross between the Marquis de Sade, Aaron Burr, Ayn Rand, and Madonna. He was wildly popular. And he wasn’t like anyone who came before him.
“You must create your life, as you’d create a work of art. It’s necessary that the life of an intellectual be artwork with him as the subject. True superiority is all here. At all costs, you must preserve liberty, to the point of intoxication,” d’Annunzio writes in Il Piacere, an ambiguously autobiographical novel published in 1889. “The rule for an intellectual is this: own, don’t be owned.”
Italian cultural histories say d’Annunzio brought Italy into the 20th century. More accurately, he introduced Italy to nihilism. He glorified a world of the senses, pleasure and beauty at all cost. (Conveniently, these costs were often fronted by other people. He was continually bankrupt.)He proposed an ethic of intense feeling, decadent and proto-Futurist: sex and violence, even if they hurt people, were ultimately good because they were beautiful and sensational—the more baroque, the better.
Read more, budding poets.
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