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

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 she would ooh! and aah! at the lovely things in Janetti’s shop window, or buy violets from the flower stall in the Piazza di Spagna (in Pleasure all the ladies carry little posies of violets inside their muffs). D’Annunzio was frequently there too. Soon they were meeting while out riding as well. And if Sin in May is to be taken as the description of an actual event, those outdoor assignations were soon deliriously pleasurable. In a wood where blackbirds sing, the poem’s narrator falls to his knees before his ‘slim blonde companion’. His hands play upon her body like a harp. She hangs over him, swaying, swooning. They lie down. Her tumbled hair forms a bed on which she stretches out: ‘I felt/The points of her breasts rising, at the lascivious/Approach of my fingers, like fleshy flowers …’. A rigor as of death freezes her, but ‘she revives as on a wave of pleasure./I bend entire over her mouth, as if to drink from a chalice, trembling at the conquest.’

The woman in the poem is called Yella (a diminutive of Mariella, a common variant of Maria). D’Annunzio was being flagrantly indiscreet, perhaps having calculated that the only way he could win Maria was by compromising her beyond redemption. The duke might himself be an upstart who had entered the ranks of the nobility by way of the bedroom: it did not follow that he would welcome a son-in-law who followed his lead. Quite the reverse. Some time early that summer Maria became pregnant (Mario d’Annunzio was born the following January), but still her father adamantly refused to sanction her marriage to the ‘penny-a-liner’.

On 28 June 1883, Gabriele d’Annunzio and Maria di Gallese took the train to Florence. Their flight was widely reported: d’Annunzio himself had probably tipped off the press. There was some attempt to veil the impropriety: most journalists covering the scandalous elopement alleged that the pair were met at the railway station (telegrams flying faster than trains) by the prefect of police, and sent straight back to Rome. It was a polite fiction. It was not until the following morning that the prefect found them at the Hotel Helvetia. Maria was hustled back to Rome, but by passing the night together in a public place the lovers had ensured that Maria’s parents would be obliged to permit their marriage.

To permit, but not to approve or bless. The duke was so outraged at a mere writer having carried off his girl that he wouldn’t attend their wedding in the chapel in the Palazzo Altemps. Worse, he refused to give Maria and her new husband any financial support, or ever to meet them. To do him justice, d’Annunzio has left no sign that he was disappointed by Maria’s lack of dowry, or by the fact that as an outcast she was unable to provide him with an entrée to the aristocratic circles that fascinated him so. The couple left town to enjoy a marital idyll. Maria was d’Annunzio’s pearl-pale, high-born damozel and he was her curly-headed page, and for a while they were entirely happy. He took her off to Pescara and lived there with her for over a year in his father’s Villa Fuoco, revelling in his freedom to enjoy a legitimate ‘horizontal life’ with his delicately lovely wife. When eventually he returned to Rome he took on another dependant. Maria’s parents separated soon after their daughter’s hasty marriage and, for a while, the duchess lived with d’Annunzio and Maria. If d’Annunzio was a fortune-hunter, he was an inept one. Instead of riches and position, he had acquired for himself two disgraced and dependent women whose upkeep he could ill afford.

BEAUTY (#ulink_9b9d9864-f5e8-5f10-9cf3-d4e965888ce5)

WHEN D’ANNUNZIO FIRST WENT to Count Primoli’s house he might have had something to say about the host, a pioneering photographer and a flamboyant dandy who took pictures of himself dressed in velvet knickerbockers. Primoli was to become another of d’Annunzio’s mentors, and played the part of go-between in two of his later love affairs. But in his account of one of his first evenings at the count’s, d’Annunzio ignores the human and lingers over the inanimate.

A large room painted Chinese red, a mass of flowers, glass lampshades shaped like birds or lilies, every surface cluttered with things. D’Annunzio made notes. ‘A dazzling shimmer: a gold-embroidered sash encircles a Hispano-Moresque platter, a length of Venetian velvet is secured by a samurai sword: a sixteenth-century globe and a mauve cope are the backdrop to a profane picture by an ultra-modern artist.’ This rich jumble, in which the very old and very new, the beautiful and the bizarre, are juxtaposed, was a model for the interiors d’Annunzio later created in his own homes, spaces which were both settings for the drama of their creator’s life and works of installation art.

D’Annunzio wrote about his contemporaries’ ‘bric-à-bracomania’. ‘Every drawing room in Rome … was laden down with “curiosities”, every lady covered her cushions with a bishop’s cope or arranged her roses in an Umbrian pharmacist’s jar or a Chalcedon goblet.’ It was a craze he entered into with enthusiasm. He rummaged through the stalls in the Campo dei Fiori, looking for coins and prints and figurines. He frequented auction houses. In Pleasure, Sperelli and Elena Muti attend the sale of a dead cardinal’s effects. Tiny, exquisite objects are passed round for prospective buyers’ inspection – Roman cameos, illuminated missals, jewels made by the goldsmiths of the Borgia court. When Elena touches something particularly fine, her ‘ducal’ fingers quiver a little, a frisson which pleases Sperelli both as boding well for her capacity for sexual ecstasy, and as evidence of the fineness of her aristocratic taste.

A shop that d’Annunzio particularly enjoyed was that run by the Beretta sisters, selling all things Japanese. He loved its clutter – ‘lacquers, bronzes, textiles, earthenware, all the rare and precious things are scattered about in a wonderful confusion of colours and shapes’. Japanese artefacts had been gradually reaching the West since the 1850s and by the time d’Annunzio arrived in Rome they were quite the fashion. Identifying a vogue, be it for a new style of hair ornament, an innovative narrative technique or a political theory, was already one of his talents. He was devouring the writings of his French contemporaries, alive to the Parisian dernier cri as well as to what was being worn, read and thought in the Italian capital. He reviewed Judith Gautier’s translations of Japanese poetry; he praised the Goncourt brothers for the way they promoted oriental art. The Berettas’ shop, with its crimson walls and glossy black woodwork, its air scented with cedar and sandalwood, was another of the places which would shape his own style.

Rare and precious things, unfortunately, are expensive, and in the early 1880s, d’Annunzio, for all the volume of his work, was not earning nearly as much as he thought he needed. Meanwhile his responsibilities were growing. He and Maria passed the first fifteen months of their married life in Pescara, Francesco Paolo having allowed them the Villa Fuoco. There, in January 1884, their son Mario was born. D’Annunzio was not to prove a dependable father, but the birth moved him. ‘I went round and round the room like a beast in a cage … I could hear a feeble, sweet mewling … I don’t know how to tell you what I felt.’ He wrote dotingly about the little pink creature with blue eyes and a tiny, tiny mouth, and made plans for him. Mario would be a painter, or perhaps a scientist. His second novel, The Innocent, contains lovingly detailed descriptions of a baby’s tiny hands and wet gums, its wildly waving arms and unfocused eyes. The novel ends though, with the fictional father killing the infant, which is impeding its parents’ love life. Less than a month after Mario was born d’Annunzio reported that he had sent his baby to stay with its grandparents. ‘It yelled too much.’

In the Abruzzi he completed another collection of stories, heavily influenced by Flaubert, describing the sexual cravings of upper-class women. The volume was published that summer of 1884 by Sommaruga, with a jacket design featuring three nude women. D’Annunzio protested that the image was ‘indecent’. Author and publisher exchanged heated letters in the columns of the journals, but it has been plausibly suggested that this apparent falling out was contrived between them in order to publicise the book.

D’Annunzio was also sending articles back to the Roman journals, but he was running out of material. A piece on the brass bands which processed around Pescara on public holidays was a particularly desperate bit of barrel-scraping; privately d’Annunzio admitted to detesting the bands’ raucous music. He was missing his friends. ‘No one comes to see me,’ he wrote to Scarfoglio. He felt out of touch. He begged to be sent the latest journals. ‘Nothing reaches me here and I’m desperate.’ In November 1884, still only twenty-one years old, he returned to Rome, taking his wife and baby with him, to take up a job as an editor and regular contributor to La Tribuna.

Over the next four years, day after day, he was to write literally hundreds of pieces, vignettes of Roman social and cultural life. Sometimes he played the erudite critic: he reviewed books and exhibitions. In discussing Renan’s Life of Jesus he launched into a discursive piece on Homer’s Elysian fields. More often he was an observer of the frivolous ‘high life’. He wrote about funerals and race meetings, about concerts and parties. He gave a lasciviously detailed account of a meal eaten after a day’s hunting: hare with rosemary and thyme; goose-liver pâté with a glaze scented with truffles; champagne. He prescribed the most graceful way to take snuff. He laid down rules about what it was appropriate for a gentleman to wear to the opera.

He had a multiplicity of names. He wrote as Sir Charles Vere de Vere; as Lila Biscuit; as Happemouche; as Bull-Calf; as Puck or Bottom (in 1887 he announced that he was about to publish a translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – it never appeared); as Miching-Mallecho (another Shakespearean reference); as the Japanese Shiun Sui Katsu Kava and – most frequently – as Duke Minimo. These fake personae were not just names, but fully developed characters, each with their own servants, houses and social lives. He invented peccadilloes for them and spoke through their differentiated voices. Sir Charles Vere de Vere describes his friend Donna Claribel, and then quotes at length from the diary she keeps in a notebook bound with wild ass’s skin (d’Annunzio had discovered Balzac). Doubly distanced from its actual author, Donna Claribel’s account of a meet of the foxhounds is an airy piece of fiction, light and funny. D’Annunzio’s major works give no hint that he had any sense of humour whatsoever, but these early pieces are playful and droll. The hack-writer was not only observing settings and characters and situations which would be recreated by the novelist. He was also trying out fictional techniques.

His most-used pseudonym was a noble one, but there was a sad irony in the name Duke Minimo (least of the dukes). In one of the ‘Duke’s’ pieces he records how he and a group of friends have been refused access to a railway carriage. ‘We were repelled by main force, as though we were so many journalists.’ D’Annunzio was well aware how the person he actually was was viewed by the kind of person he aspired to be.

Andrea Sperelli, his fictional alter ego, lives in a huge, sumptuously decorated apartment in the Palazzo Zuccari, at the top of the Spanish Steps, around the corner from where d’Annunzio had rented one attic room next to a brothel. Elena Muti, d’Annunzio’s imaginary duchess, has an apartment in the Palazzo Barberini, where room after room is furnished with carved chests, classical busts, bronze platters and curtains embroidered with golden unicorns. D’Annunzio and his family lived in a cramped rented apartment in a narrow street nearby. In 1886 his second son, Gabriellino, was born. Veniero followed a year later. When Andrea Sperelli returns to his tapestry-hung rooms after a lunch party, he is at leisure to stretch languidly in front of his fire and muse on beauty and art until his manservant reminds him that it is time to dress for a dinner. His creator had deadlines to meet, bills to pay and, increasingly, creditors to placate. What he called the ‘miserable daily grind’ permitted him no respite.

Before going to a ball, Sperelli is invariably invited to dinner in one of Rome’s great palaces. D’Annunzio, by contrast, eating alone once in a beer shop, dozed off and dreamt of a ballroom all hung around with camellias and cradles. In each cradle there is a baby: each baby is crying loudly. The noise is excruciating. As the ballroom fills with couples, the gentlemen each take up several babies and attempt to dance while carrying them on their shoulders or under their armpits or beneath their waistcoats. The babies scream and wriggle, and poke their fingers into the dancer’s eyes, setting up such a hullabaloo that eventually the dreamer/writer awakes. It’s a dream that any exhausted new parent can identify with, that of a young father living in a small apartment with (at the time this piece was written) two children under the age of two and a half, striving to lead the exquisite life he so admired and coveted, but sleep-deprived and encumbered night and day by his offspring.

D’Annunzio’s need for money troubled him perhaps less than it ought to have done. Maria relates that, on receiving a fee desperately needed for the payment of household bills, he went ‘light and gay as a little bird’ to squander it all on a jade ornament. His compulsion to spend was at best reckless, at worst pathological.

He was not unmercenary. His correspondence demonstrates how much of his energy went into wheedling or browbeating his publishers into advancing him inordinately large sums against books as yet (and in some cases always to remain) unwritten. Once his novels were being published abroad, he studied exchange rates and timed his demands for the payments of his foreign royalties accordingly. When, in his famous middle age, he heard that a hotelier had, rather than banking his cheque, kept it for the sake of his autograph, he wondered if there was any way of persuading others to do likewise. But acquisitive as he was, he was also incorrigibly extravagant. While Maria, housekeeping for the first time in her hitherto privileged life, struggled to find cash for the butcher and baker, her husband allowed Sommaruga to pay him for his contributions to the Cronaca Bizantina with credit at the florist’s shop.

After two years at La Tribuna he wrote to the proprietor, Prince Maffeo Colonna di Sciarra, a letter which was in part a request for a pay rise, in part another literary self-portrait. ‘By temperament and by instinct I have a need for the superfluous.’ He must have beautiful things about him. ‘I could have lived very well in a modest house … taken tea in a threepenny cup, blown my nose on handkerchiefs at two lire the dozen … Instead, fatally, I have wanted Persian carpets, Japanese plates, bronzes, ivories, trinkets, all those useless, lovely things which I love with profound and ruinous passion.’ There is nothing apologetic about this self-description. An archangel cannot be expected to match his expenditure to the means available, after the manner of a penny-pinching tradesman. Nor can one of those superior beings whose role it is to ‘think and feel’. Prodigality is an aristocratic vice, a perverted form of largesse. Besides, d’Annunzio was not simply a self-indulgent squanderer (although he was that too). He was, in the most literal meaning of the word, an aesthete, one for whom the cult of beauty took the place of morality.

Writing art reviews and journalistic essays, d’Annunzio was pleased to be following the lead given by Baudelaire in the previous generation. The author of Les Fleurs du mal was also an influential art critic, and his essay on the ‘dandy’ defined a new kind of hero. ‘These beings have no other aim, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.’ Baudelaire had many followers among the French Decadents and Symbolists whom d’Annunzio was reading greedily – Théophile Gautier, Henri Régnier, Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1882, d’Annunzio’s first year in Rome, Walter Pater, whom d’Annunzio had read with Nencioni, visited the city for the first time, subsequently writing Marius the Epicurean, a novel in which homoerotic fantasy entwines itself around philosophical musings. Meanwhile Oscar Wilde, who called Pater’s essays ‘the holy writ of beauty’, was touring the United States. There Wilde, in velvet frock coat and satin breeches, lectured on the ‘House Beautiful’, not so much a style of interior decoration as an aspiration closely parallel to the d’Annunzian injunction that a life must be made in the same way as a work of art.

That beautiful life was at once ancient and modern. ‘All the literature of the present day is abject rubbish,’ wrote Giosuè Carducci. ‘Let us return then to true art, to the Greeks and the Latins. What ridiculous little dwarfs are these Italian realists!’ D’Annunzio had been one of those dwarfs, but the poems written during the first year and a half of his marriage, which would be published under the collective titles of La Chimera (pseudo-classical) and Isaotta Guttadauro (pseudo-mediaeval), are newly written examples of centuries-old verse-forms. Their words are archaic, their imagery (lilies, pomegranates, ailing damozels) is pre-Raphaelite. Their rhyme-schemes are tight, their rhythms song-like. Jewels and flowers heavy with erotic symbolism are disposed around the figures of noble maidens and their knightly suitors. Even the spelling is pseudo-antique. Soon after the publication of Isaotta Guttadauro a parody appeared, entitled Risaotto al Pomidauro (tomato risotto – spelt in an equally faked-up olde-worlde manner).

Scarfoglio had published the parody. D’Annunzio, ostensibly deeply offended, challenged him to a duel, which took place without injury to either party. It was widely suspected that (like the spat with Sommaruga over the ‘obscene’ jacket illustration) the parody, challenge and duel had been got up between the two friends as a way of drawing attention to the poems.

ELITISM (#ulink_64ef6d6e-9c80-53f0-b86e-6f0bbe654e93)

IN SEPTEMBER 1885, d’Annunzio quarrelled with a journalist, Carlo Magnico, and challenged him to a duel. At school d’Annunzio had been a prize-winning fencer. In Rome he had kept himself in training, but Magnico, who had the advantage of being considerably taller, bested him. D’Annunzio received a wound to the head, only a shallow cut, but it rattled him. (Pleasure’s hero comes close to being killed in a duel.) The writer and editor Mathilde Serao was present at the fight. She relates that the doctor, alarmed by the amount of blood d’Annunzio was losing, poured iron perchlorate over the wound. The bleeding was staunched, but the chemical did irreparable damage to d’Annunzio’s hair follicles – or so Serao, perhaps prompted by d’Annunzio, maintained. Soon afterwards he was bald.

The story, which has been repeated by all d’Annunzio’s biographers, doesn’t stand up. Photographs of d’Annunzio show no noticeable scar on his bald pate. What they do show is his hair receding gradually and along the usual lines. He goes bald just as other men go bald. But d’Annunzio did not want to be as other men. He had been proud of his ‘forest of curls’. The beginning of the end of his life as an ‘ephebe’ (a favourite word of his) was painful, and required transformation. The banal misfortune of losing his hair was reimagined as a battle wound. No longer an androgynous sprite, he began to construct a new persona for himself, that of the virile hero.

Many Italians were looking for such a hero, an autocratic Great Man. Italy’s parliamentary democracy was (as it has remained) desperately unstable: in its first forty years it saw thirty-five different administrations. In the 1860s, the first decade of its existence, it was stained by a scandal surrounding a manifestly corrupt deal over the tobacco monopoly. By 1873 one of its members described parliament as ‘a sordid pigsty, where the most honest men lose all sense of decency and shame’.

The aristocrats who had previously had a monopoly of power despised parliament as a talking shop for the vulgar. Politicians on the left complained that its members represented no one but the wealthy. Elections were all too obviously rigged. Even where the ballot boxes were untampered with, few votes were truly free. Initially the electorate was tiny, and successive reform bills extending the franchise only served to shore up the forces of reaction. The lower down the social scale the voter, the more likely he was to vote docilely as his priest or his landlord instructed him. In the countryside the new democracy looked much like mediaeval feudalism. British historian Christopher Duggan sums up: ‘Bribery of all sorts was commonplace – money, food, offers of jobs, loans – and in many parts of the south men with a reputation for violence – bandits, or mafiosi – were widely deployed to intimidate voters. Election days were frequently turned into carnival occasions with landowners marching their supporters, as if they were a feudal army, off to the polling stations accompanied by musicians, priests and dignitaries.’ Those few ‘new men’ who attained a seat in parliament were perceived (largely correctly) as being as self-serving as their predecessors, and ill-educated to boot.

In 1882, a few months after d’Annunzio’s arrival in Rome, Giuseppe Garibaldi died. Garibaldi had been extremely troublesome to Italy’s government up to the end of his life but, dead, he became its totem. Francesco Crispi, who had been one of his lieutenants, announced, paraphrasing Carlyle, that ‘in certain periods of history … Providence causes an exceptional being to arise in the world … His marvellous exploits capture the imagination, and the masses regard him as superhuman.’ Garibaldi was such a being. ‘There was something divine in the life of this man.’

In his lifetime Garibaldi had proposed that he should be made a ‘dictator’. The word was a long-unused Latin title, which had yet to acquire the fell associations it now has, meaning one granted extraordinary powers for a limited period at a time of national crisis. On occasion, explained Garibaldi, he had wished for such powers as, in his time as a seaman, he had sometimes seized the ship’s helm, knowing he was the only man on board who could steer it through a storm. In the Italy he had helped bring into being there were many who, disenchanted with the corruption and incompetence of their parliamentarians, longed for just such a ‘dictator’. ‘Today Italy is like a ship in a mighty storm,’ wrote a political commentator in 1876. ‘Where is the pilot? I cannot see one.’

D’Annunzio read Darwin while he was still at school, and quickly grasped the salient point that evolution was a continuing process. It followed that, in any generation, there will be some individuals who are more highly evolved than others. Men (and women) were not, in d’Annunzio’s view, born equal. As Pleasure’s Andrea Sperelli passes from palace to palace he is depressed by the sight of workers in the streets. Some are injured or sick. Others are swaggering arm in arm, singing lewd songs. They are jarring reminders that, outside the warm, scented drawing rooms in which the god-like aristos indulge themselves, swarm the lesser kind of humans, most of them ‘bestial’.

D’Annunzio wrote to a composer friend: ‘Make much of yourself, for God’s sake! … Don’t be afraid of the fight: it is Darwin’s struggle for life [d’Annunzio’s English], the inevitable, inexorable struggle. Down with him who concedes defeat. Down with the humble!’ His friend should not be scandalised by these ‘unchristian maxims’, he goes on. Altruism and humility must be laid aside. ‘Listen to me … I have much experience of fighting furiously with my elbows.’ He is aggressive and competitive and proud of it. D’Annunzio had yet to read Nietzsche but already he was thinking along Nietzschean lines. ‘The reign of the nonentity is finished. The violent ones rise up.’

MARTYRDOM (#ulink_85b5b947-a168-553f-b3eb-173c7579b27c)

WHEN I MARRIED MY HUSBAND,’ the Duchessina Maria said once, ‘I thought I was marrying poetry. I would have done better to buy, for three and a half lire, each of his volumes of verse.’

Their idyll was short-lived. Shortly after d’Annunzio brought his wife and baby back to Rome he began an affair with a fellow journalist, Olga Ossani, who wrote for the Capitan Fracassa under the name of Febea. Olga had, according to her new lover, the head of Praxiteles’ Hermes. D’Annunzio was pleased by her ‘strange bloodless face’ and her prematurely white hair. She was clever and unconventional: it was by no means common for a woman to write for the press. He described her at a press ball in the month their liaison began, stretched out on a sofa, laughing and exchanging witty ‘little impertinences’ with the gentlemen besieging her.

D’Annunzio was attracted to independent-minded women. He liked to try out his ideas on them, inserting into his love letters extended passages of prose which would reappear in his essays or novels. He wanted them to be discriminating readers, and to be capable of entertaining him. He had called Elda ‘child’ (which, given her age when they met, was almost literally descriptive), but he didn’t usually choose infantile partners. Olga Ossani, a few years older than d’Annunzio, was one of a line of mature, talented women who were to become his lovers.

They used to meet in a room rented for the purpose (a reckless extravagance for a man who could barely pay for his main home) which he decorated with Japanese screens and swathed with green silk. Or they would walk in the gardens of the sixteenth-century Villa Medici (then and now the French Academy of Rome). Henry James called the villa’s mannerist gardens ‘the most enchanting in Rome’. James loved the wooded hill which rises above the formal parterres. ‘The Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm … a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks. Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted place, such a soft suffusion of tender grey-green tones.’ One day, after a bout of love-making during which Ossani had covered him with ‘the bites of a vampire’, d’Annunzio left their room with his body ‘as spotted as a panther’. The following evening they met again in the Villa Medici’s ‘dusky forest’. ‘Sudden fancy. The moon was shining through the holm oaks. I hid. I took off my light summer suit. I called her, leaning against an oleander, posing as though I was tied to it. The moon bathed my naked body, and all the bruises were visible.’

A fashionable parlour game of the period was that of tableaux vivants: players dressed up (often very elaborately) and posed as historical or legendary characters. Other party guests were required to identify them. Olga guessed d’Annunzio’s conundrum at once. ‘“Saint Sebastian!” she cried.’ As she embraced him, he felt, with a delicious shudder, that invisible arrows were thrust through his wounds and fixed into the tree behind.

Soon after that night, d’Annunzio wrote to Olga, signing himself ‘St Sebastian’, and urging her to read Salammbô, Flaubert’s novel set in ancient Carthage, in which a physically splendid Libyan warrior allows himself to be tortured to death for love of a priestess, and in which scores of human victims are sacrificed to a pitiless god. ‘Your exquisite intellect will derive from this reading one of the most extended and profound of voluptuous pleasures,’ he told her.

The association of pain with pleasure was a commonplace of late nineteenth-century art and literature, and it often manifested itself in biblical stories or legends of the saints. Flaubert wrote about the self-inflicted tortures endured by Christian saints. ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean!’ wrote Swinburne, ‘the world has grown grey from Thy breath,’ but Swinburne’s poetry, like d’Annunzio’s, is replete with religious imagery. Oscar Wilde (like Flaubert before him) would soon be writing a jewelled and sadistic version of the story of Salome and John the Baptist. Biblical themes provided both an oriental setting and an antique grandeur, combining the two exoticisms of place and time, and the cult of the martyrs added to the mix the intoxicating stench of blood.

St Sebastian is a sexually suggestive martyr. Vasari tells us that a painting of him by Fra Bartolommeo had to be removed from its altar because it ‘sparked lascivious desire’ in women who saw it. Nearly three centuries later, Stendhal reported that the problem hadn’t gone away. Guido Reni’s paintings of St Sebastian (of which there are several) had been taken down because ‘pious women kept falling in love with them’.

Sebastian was a Roman officer at the beginning of the fourth century, condemned to death for his Christian beliefs. The Golden Legend, the thirteenth-century compendium of saints’ lives, relates that he was shot full of arrows and left for dead. He revived and returned to the imperial palace in the hope that his miraculous escape would convince the co-emperors, Diocletian and Maximianus, of Christ’s divine power. The emperors remained obdurate. Sebastian was condemned a second time. He was beaten to death and his body thrown into the main sewer.

In early representations he is a mature, bearded man, fatherly and fully dressed as befits an officer. But by the fourteenth century it had become conventional for painters to depict him as a beautiful youth stripped bare. In the 1370s, Giovanni del Biondo showed him hoisted on a stake, nude but for a loincloth, in a pose which invites comparison with Christ’s crucifixion, and so bristling with arrow shafts he looks – as an early iconographer remarked – ‘like a hedgehog’. Subsequent depictions are more graceful, more erotic. Piero della Francesca, Antonello da Messina, Mantegna, Guido Reni and numerous others have him standing or leaning, head falling back as though in an ecstasy of pain, his beautiful nearly naked body cruelly pierced.

Arrows are associated with Cupid. To be struck by them is to be inflamed by sexual passion. When d’Annunzio and Olga had their tryst in the Villa Medici gardens, Sigmund Freud had yet to begin studying nervous disorders, but d’Annunzio would not have needed psychoanalytic theory to point out to him that the vision of a physically perfect youth helplessly exposed to penetration by his tormentors’ shafts is a potent image of ravishment.

D’Annunzio shared his preoccupation with the saint with a number of his celebrated contemporaries: writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde (who assumed the name Sebastian after his release from prison) and the photographer Frederick Holland Day. These men, and subsequent Sebastianophiles Yukio Mishima (whose ideas and life story in many ways reflect d’Annunzio’s), film-maker Derek Jarman, and the photographers Pierre et Gilles, were all, at least to some extent, homosexual. Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneering German sexologist and contemporary of d’Annunzio, identified pictures of St Sebastian as being among the images in which an ‘invert’ would take special delight. D’Annunzio’s Sebastian cult raises unavoidable questions about his sexual orientation.

That d’Annunzio was an eager lover of women is a copiously documented fact. Whether he also enjoyed sex with men is unknown. Some of his schoolboy letters could be interpreted as suggesting so, but it was not unusual in d’Annunzio’s lifetime for same-sex friends to write to each other as sentimentally as lovers. Here is his account of an adolescent friendship with another boy: ‘We smiled at each other, scarcely, scarcely glancing at each other from beneath the corners of our eyelids … and I have never forgotten that moment of our friendship; which glows for me with an inexplicable beauty.’ Writing to his elder patrons he was flirtatious and emotional. He told Cesare Fontana: ‘I have read and reread your lovely letter twenty times … What can I say in return for so many sweet, fond, expressions of affection? That I love you too? … Oh believe it, believe, dear friend.’

If d’Annunzio did have sexual contact with any of these boys or men, it would not be surprising that he didn’t publicly admit to it; few men at this time would have dared do so. But given the quantity of his private writings – letters, notebooks, jottings – to which we now have access, and given his compulsion to note everything, even the most intimate details of his love life, the absence of any recorded trace of a homosexual affair strongly suggests that he never had one. In his memoirs he explicitly distinguishes his sentimental ‘friendships’ with other boys, from the ‘love’ which he had yet – at the time recollected – to experience. In his late novel, Maybe Yes, Maybe No, he imagines a pair of male friends, comrades who undertake a sequence of masculine adventures together. Their comradeship is so strong precisely because it is ‘clean’. Like a great many other men of his generation, he idealised male companionship as an escape from the erotic, from the clinging, energy-sapping, over-ripeness of the women whom he bedded.

Whatever his orientation, though, there was something sexually ambiguous about d’Annunzio. The adolescent whose feminine prettiness and girlish voice had so enchanted Scarfoglio, matured into a small man with wide womanly hips who took a far greater interest in clothes and flowers and table-settings than was generally considered consonant with heterosexual masculinity.