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

At Francavilla he could talk about composition with composers, and observe how a sculptor and a painter gave form to their visions. There he would write, so he tells us, in rooms papered with his host’s sketches, with the sculptor Barbella modelling a bust beside him, with another comrade playing Schubert on a mandolin, and Tosti singing the refrain of a lullaby. ‘[Michetti’s] villa is truly the Temple of Art and we are its priests.’

It was in that temple that d’Annunzio began to see his native region as a fit subject for literary treatment. With Michetti he embarked on long rides into the region’s mountainous hinterland. These outings took him into a world at once archaic and exotic. The rural people were ‘almost dwarfs, with snub noses and flattened lips’, but dressed with a kind of ‘oriental’ splendour. D’Annunzio described a wedding party as a riot of ‘silk dresses, brocade scarves, big gold earrings; toasts accompanied by the delirious-making hum of guitars … gunshots … hailstorm of confetti … joyful cries’.

The members of the Cenacolo all shared an interest in the traditional culture of the Abruzzi. Tosti was collecting folk songs. Michetti’s friends also included Gennaro Finamore, author of a vocabulary of the Abruzzese dialect and a transcriber of folk tales, and the ethnologist Antonio de Nino, whose Abruzzese Customs and Costumes ran to six volumes. The poet Bruni wrote verse in the Abruzzese dialect, which Tosti set to music for a ‘chorus of youths’ to sing during an al fresco ceremony on Easter Monday. The subject of all Michetti’s art, wrote d’Annunzio later, was the ‘ancient vital race of the Abruzzi, so vigorous, so thoughtful, so full of song’.

For over a century European intellectuals had been searching in isolated rural communities for remnants of obsolete folk cultures. Ethnography was practised most enthusiastically in situations where nationalism needed to assert itself against an alien regime. James Macpherson, ‘discovering’ ancient Gaelic poems (most of them, published under the name of Ossian, his own forgeries) and his admirer and successor Sir Walter Scott, collecting songs and tales in the Scottish Highlands, were intent on demonstrating that Scotland had as rich a cultural heritage as England, its politically dominant neighbour to the south. While Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were growing up, the majority of German states were under Napoleonic rule. Their collecting of fairy tales ‘found among the common German peasantry’ was not just conservationist, it was ‘imaginative state-building’. The Gaelic League, set up in Ireland in 1893 for the preservation and promotion of Gaelic language and literature, aimed to provide inspiration for an independent Irish state.

So Michetti, touring the Abruzzi in search of picturesque peasant girls in embroidered bodices and home-spun red skirts, and Tosti, with his transcriptions of the songs sung by harvesters in the fields, were providing the cultural underpinnings for the new Italian nation. But it was not easy, as many patriotic ethnographers discovered, to identify authentic relics of indigenous culture. Several of the stories the Grimms collected to provide the new Germany with an unadulterated German back-story were in fact imported by French Huguenots. So d’Annunzio’s Italian friends were swayed by non-Italian influences. Their subject matter was local, but their interest in it was aroused by foreign examples. Michetti’s paintings owe much to the French realists: Corot, Courbet and Millet. Even the name of their fellowship was a borrowing. Over half a century earlier, in Paris, Victor Hugo had presided over a ‘Cénacle’.

At Francavilla, d’Annunzio swam: he was an exceptionally strong swimmer. ‘We bathed down there, like savages on the bare beach.’ He galloped his horse along the sand and rowed his little boat offshore. He and his friends cooked for each other, as inexpertly as young men accustomed to being waited on by servants or mothers have always cooked; he was to remember with pride a gigantic omelette he managed. Michetti posed his guests for photographs on the beach: d’Annunzio looks as faunlike as he liked to imagine himself – curly hair falling forward, a slight body taut with energy. There are women in some of the pictures, incongruously overdressed by contrast with the men, in long-sleeved gowns and big hats. This was not the monastic retreat d’Annunzio suggested in writing to Elda.

In the evenings there was wine, although d’Annunzio – then and for the rest of his life – was an abstemious drinker. There was opium, which he took to with gusto (‘in no time I became a passionate opium eater’). Aware that he was being ‘stunned’ by the drug, he soon left off taking it (‘but what beautiful moments I had!’). At night, sitting out among olive trees whose branches had been turned silver by the full moon (an effect d’Annunzio would use repeatedly in his fiction), they sang the choruses and lullabies that Tosti had been collecting and weaving into his newly composed ‘serenades’. Sometimes they would hear those eerie, repetitive melodies echoed back to them by unseen workers in the countryside around.

During the summer of 1880, Michetti and d’Annunzio made two excursions which were to be particularly fruitful for both of them. One took them to the village of Tocco di Casauria at harvest time. There they witnessed a scene involving a handsome young woman and some drunken harvesters. Michetti began that winter to make studies for one of his most celebrated paintings, La Figlia di Jorio (Jorio’s Daughter), which was finally exhibited at the first Venice Biennale fourteen years later. It shows a peasant girl, in a scarlet dress and shawl, hurrying past a group of leering men. D’Annunzio was to make something much more violent of the subject. He described the event in an interview: ‘Suddenly there burst into the little square a beautiful young woman, crying and dishevelled, followed by a throng of harvesters, brutalised by the sun, by wine and lust.’ From that one tableau he would devise a story of sexual transgression and mob violence which, nearly a quarter of a century later, became his most successful play, also called Jorio’s Daughter.

The other memorable outing was their visit, on a suffocatingly hot summer’s day, to the church of San Pantaleone at Miglianico. The church was crammed with pilgrims who had come to celebrate the saint’s feast day, to expiate sins and pray for miracles. Michetti depicted the scene in his painting The Vow, which was exhibited in Rome in 1883 to great acclaim. He makes a grand spectacle of the gorgeous colours of the girls’ embroidered costumes, the slanting light from the church’s high windows and the tragic drama of the dying come to beg for grace.

To d’Annunzio, though, the scene in the church was a horror show. In his account an animal stench rises from the bodies crammed together in the dimly lit church. At the centre of the crowd a kind of furrow is left open, a narrow passage walled with humanity, along which crawl devotees. ‘Three, four, five lunatics came writhing with their bellies on the ground, with their tongues on the dust of the tiles, with their feet rigidly flexed to support the weight of their bodies. Reptiles.’ There is blood on their feet and hands. They are licking the floor before them as they inch forward, drawing crosses with their own saliva. ‘The red stains that one fanatic has left, are rubbed by the dry tongue of the next fanatic.’ The crawlers, one by one, approach the silver effigy of the saint, each one grasping him around the neck ‘with a supreme effort which seemed akin to hatred’ and each fix a bleeding mouth to the saint’s metal mouth and hang there, ‘with a kind of convulsion of pleasure’. The watchers moan.

D’Annunzio was to return to the scene again and again. His fullest description of what he had seen at Miglianico would not be published for another fifteen years, forming part of The Triumph of Death, but in his early stories he repeatedly plays variations on the themes of religious solace, religious frenzy, and the power of the mob.

During his last winter at school, d’Annunzio wrote several of the short stories which would be published in his first prose collection, Terra Virgine. Probably prompted by Tito Zucconi, he was reading Zola (in particular The Sin of Father Mouret), Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Giovanni Verga’s newly published Life in the Fields. Soon, he discovered de Maupassant and Flaubert. Each new addition to his reading list can be detected in his own writing. He lifts a great deal from his foreign examples. He repeats phrases and reproduces syntactical construction. His plots are borrowed (one of his tragic-comic lovers is a bell ringer who pines away for love of a gypsy girl). His structures are ready made (The Virgin Anna follows the progression of Flaubert’s Un Cœur simple movement by movement). More importantly, the other writers’ realism had shown d’Annunzio that he could make use of the material he had found in his native province.

D’Annunzio was not a sentimentalist like Victor Hugo, nor a campaigner for social justice like Zola. When he describes the stultifying hardness of the lives of peasants or labourers, he does so not with compassion but with something closer to disgust. His stories of the Abruzzi are full of stupid violence. A beggar exhibiting his crippled child, a fisherman’s love perverted by jealousy, a pathetic idiot who takes pleasure in killing lizards very, very slowly. D’Annunzio took these examples of human degradation and embroidered around each of them a piece of carefully wrought prose. Michetti and his friends had taught him to pay attention to the culture of his homeland, with its rich heritage of ritual and belief. They had not persuaded him to like it. He has one of his fictional alter egos reflect that to discover that the countryside, whose beauty he loves, is home to so much primitive fear and credulity, is like running one’s fingers through a woman’s scented hair only to find, hidden beneath, ‘a teeming mass of lice’.

D’Annunzio’s sense of homeland would become an important theme in his politics and his self-presentation – ‘I carry the soil of the Abruzzi on the soles of my feet,’ he wrote – but he certainly didn’t want to live there. In 1914 the Pescaran authorities offered to give him a house in recognition of his status as the region’s great man. He declined. He was by then bankrupt in Italy and amassing enormous debts in France too, but for him the Abruzzi was a philistine backwater and Pescara a place redolent of old age and gross, squalid sins. Despite professing the greatest affection for what he called ‘my Abruzzi’, he much preferred swindling hoteliers or sponging off his admirers to being confined to his homeland.

YOUTH (#ulink_4d85358f-c3e9-5886-9ada-ebcf978aa4e3)

SING THE IMMENSE JOY … of being young,’ wrote the eighteen-year-old d’Annunzio. ‘Of biting the fruits of the earth/With sound, white voracious teeth.’ The clandestine nationalist movement which Giuseppe Mazzini had founded in the 1830s, and which eventually drove the Risorgimento, was called Young Italy, signalling that the new nation was to be, not an amalgam of the decrepit statelets it united, but a vigorous new entity. D’Annunzio would employ the same rhetoric once he began his political career, but he also prized youth for its own sake. And when he first arrived in Rome he could exult in being the youngest of his circle of friends and patrons.

That circle was ready. The night before he set out for Rome in November 1881, he wrote to Elda, pretending to complain about his precocious celebrity. ‘So, so many friends are waiting for me there, so many admirers. It’ll be a fearful bore for the first few days!’

He was registered at the university’s Faculty of Literature, he may even have attended a few lectures. But most of his energies were directed elsewhere. While he was still at school his first published stories had appeared in the Fanfulla della Domenica, whose editorial board included his mentor Nenciono and in whose pages Chiarini’s generous review of Primo Vere had been published. Another useful contact was a fellow Abruzzese, Edoardo Scarfoglio, poet and editor of the weekly paper Capitan Fracassa – irreverent, satirical, written by and aimed at the young. It was Scarfoglio who, yawning at his desk one day, had been so electrified by d’Annunzio’s first appearance in his office, and it was Scarfoglio with whom, the following summer, d’Annunzio would take off for Sardinia. With his already published volumes as calling-cards, d’Annunzio was soon a prolific freelance writer, selling poems, stories and occasional pieces to the journals springing up to feed the new market of educated middle-class readers.

Scarfoglio saw him as something from the pages of Chateaubriand or Victor Hugo, ‘the incarnation of the romantic ideal of the poet’. Another of his new acquaintances described his ‘chestnut locks, slick and scented with unguents’ (all his life he tended his body as carefully as any courtesan), and his ‘forehead as smooth and white as that of a small angel in a Church procession’. Before long he met Angelo Sommaruga, a risk-taking young impresario (who would soon be facing criminal charges for bribery and extortion). Sommaruga prided himself on his readiness to take on potentially scandalous new work. Soon he had d’Annunzio contributing to his magazine, and had undertaken to publish the young author’s next volume of verse, and his first collection of stories.

It was only just over a decade since the Pope had ceded his temporal power to Italy, and the Italian government, formerly based in Turin, had moved to Rome. For centuries the city had been a beautiful backwater. By 1881 it was an enormous building site. Olive groves and cow pastures and aristocratic gardens which had survived within the ancient walls for a millennium were being built over to accommodate the hordes of politicians and courtiers and civil servants and journalists and entrepreneurs who had descended on the newly booming city.

D’Annunzio lodged initially in an attic room in the heart of the city, between the Corso and the Piazza di Spagna. Close by was a brothel. When he returned home at night he would find its clients leaning against his front door or attempting to kick it in. Physically energetic, he went to the fencing schools in the mornings, and rode out into the countryside in the afternoons. He enjoyed his new friends. The Capitan Fracassa’s editorial office, facetiously nicknamed the ‘yellow drawing room’, was a single room above a beer shop, whose two windows gave onto a narrow alley. Its yellow wallpaper was covered with sketches and slogans left by the writers, artists, actors and politicians who came there to deliver their contributions and to pick up gossip. It was always buzzing with conversation, and when more space was needed the regulars would move on to the pastry shop nearby, where they had euphoric dawn breakfasts after the journal had been put to bed each week. Sommaruga’s Cronaca Bizantina had grander premises in the Palazzo Ruspoli and a more louche atmosphere. D’Annunzio described himself taking the stairs one morning ‘with great leaps’, hopeful of finding there ‘a magnificent, unlettered lady’ for whose favours he and some of his fellow writers were competing.

Michetti provided introductions. There were convivial evenings in the Caffè Roma or the elegant eighteenth-century Caffè Greco. The latter was a favourite meeting place for painters, several of whom would become d’Annunzio’s friends and the illustrators of his books. There were evenings with Paolo Tosti ‘in a mysterious apartment full of dark corridors’. Tosti would improvise at the piano for hours on end, while the singer Mary Tescher, in black lace and jet jewellery, sang Schubert’s Lieder and the guests lolled on sofas or on the floor. There were gatherings at the studio of the sculptor Moïse Ezekiel inside the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. There were evenings in a house down by the Tiber where a ‘pleiade’ of young artists lived and worked. There were available women. D’Annunzio wrote to an Abruzzese friend boasting that he had inscribed some verses ‘on the white shoulders of a lascivious hetaera’. The tableau evoked is literary – d’Annunzio is modelling his self-image here on the cynical Vicomte de Valmont in Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. But what he is describing is a visit to a brothel.

In the year and a half between his first arrival in Rome and his marriage, d’Annunzio wrote a sequence of poems in which lubriciousness alternates with a nauseous revulsion from sex. The sonnet L’Inconsapevole epitomises the mood. It describes luxuriant foliage fertilised by the rotting flesh of a corpse, and someone reaching out to pluck a flower like a bloody wound and finding his hand stung by a bitter poison. The poems triggered off a heated public debate about ‘indecency’. D’Annunzio boasted that in them he described sex in impeccable prosody and with a frankness unknown since the work of the Renaissance pornographer, Pietro Aretino.

He writes about letting his tired head fall at dawn on sloping breasts, about ‘ascending a furrow’ between feminine loins. He devotes a sonnet to the sensation, vividly described, of fellatio. He was pursuing pleasure both in bed and on paper, but he was not happy about it. ‘Atrocious sadness of the unclean flesh when the flame of desire is extinguished in icy disgust and no veil of love is cast around the inert nakedness.’ In his first novel he gives his own taste for Aretino to a wholly unsympathetic character, a debauched English milord. He told Scarfoglio that he was craving the bracing cold of an Abruzzese winter, that he was feeling jaded and seedy. ‘The strength of my barbarous youth lies slain in the arms of women,’ he wrote in Sed non Satiatus. For him the female was always somehow overripe. Youth was pure, clean, strong, barbaric, male.

NOBILITY (#ulink_e524f9b8-63e8-52e0-9974-ad299a8fd7e6)

ONE SUNDAY MORNING in May 1879 a troop of the Cicognini boys, preceded by the school band, marched in military order from Prato to Poggio a Caiano, some ten kilometres distant. They stopped for a picnic breakfast of bread, salami and wine in a park en route and picked between them an immense bunch of daisies. Somehow (because that was the kind of boy he was) it fell to Gabriele d’Annunzio to present the bouquet to the head teacher’s wife.

With flowers in their buttonholes and their cap bands, the boys marched on into Poggio. They were met by another band from the town, and, with shouts of ‘Long Live the King!’ they proceeded on to the Villa Medici, built by Giuliano di Sangallo for Lorenzo the Magnificent, and by this time a (seldom-used) royal residence.

D’Annunzio was enraptured. Here was a setting for the kind of life he dreamed of. ‘Great rooms painted with flowers and adorned with immensely valuable paintings: elegant and mysterious bedrooms; and everywhere a profusion of lamps, of mirrors, of carved chests, of marble tables, and over all something entrancingly venerable and ancient.’ He hung back as the other boys hurried out into the gardens. For a quarter of an hour he stayed alone in the frescoed salon that Vasari once called the most beautiful room in the world, indulging in a reverie that was part erotic fantasy, part awed contemplation of the glamour and grandeur of the Italian aristocracy. ‘I seemed to hear the rustle of Bianca Capello’s silk dress, to hear her yielding sighs and sweet words.’ Bianca Capello was a sixteenth-century beauty whose portrait by Allori d’Annunzio could have seen in the Uffizi. She and her Medici lover died mysteriously on the same day in 1578, probably poisoned by his relatives. D’Annunzio was thrilling himself with a tale of murder and forbidden passion. Any moment, he told himself, he might see a knight in armour, ‘his eyes flaming behind his visor, his sword unsheathed’.

The boys ate their lunch al fresco and went boating, but then it began to rain. An arched colonnade runs all around the villa at ground level. The boys took shelter there, and began to dance. It was a jolly scene, but for d’Annunzio, as precocious sexually as he was intellectually, it lacked a certain something. He had been eyeing the major-domo’s three daughters. He slipped into the house ‘for a glass of water’, and asked the prettiest of the trio if she would dance with him – ‘Just one waltz?’ She assented. They passed into the great salon. Soon some other boys joined them. ‘So we had a real dancing party … a bacchanal.’ He was twirling over the floor where Lorenzo the Magnificent had once trod, between walls decorated by some of the most revered artists of Italy’s golden past. ‘I enjoyed myself,’ the sixteen-year-old d’Annunzio told his mother; ‘very much; perhaps even very, very much.’

As a child in Pescara, d’Annunzio was a person of consequence, the mayor’s eldest son, living in one of the best houses in town. At the Villa Fuoco, the family’s country retreat, there were wide balustraded terraces, with stone pilasters topped by terracotta pots in the shape of the busts of kings and queens, their crowns 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 to which d’Annunzio responded most passionately was the Rome of the great aristocratic families.

He loved the patrician villas. He admired 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’.