The poet was dead when the doctor arrived. Gabriele D’Annunzio had collapsed on the desk where he usually ate dinner those days, secluded in the antechamber of his bedroom, so that visitors would not see how he could barely chew with bare gums. Beyond the loss of teeth and physical decay, the last few years had been cruel to the old seducer, suffering from several illnesses and with a rampant addiction to cocaine. When his secretary found him unconscious, in fact, he hurried to empty the little gold boxes with the remains of that substance that had accompanied him religiously since he began taking it on his military adventures with his legionnaires. The author’s life was on a decline, but even then, and despite the lights and shadows that his biography and his dalliances with fascism had illuminated, he was one of the most fascinating characters in modern Italy. His amazing mansion, on the shores of Lake Garda, now converted into the museum of the Vittoriale degli Italiani Foundation, is today the best witness of that enormous undertaking.
Gabriele D’Annunzio was already a national myth when he fell in love with the house on that hill. Nicknamed Il Vate (the prophet) for his ability to lead the masses, he was the cocktail shaker where they mixed the passions, anxieties, hunger for horizons and new certainties of the Italy that incubated the monster of fascism. Writer and poet, light aircraft pilot who was blinded in a landing and flew over Vienna at the time of the Great War to cover it with leaflets demanding its surrender, had shortly before led a group of men with a “thirst for wind and storm.” . He wanted to recover the unredeemed lands under Austro-Hungarian rule: Trentino, Venezia Giulia and the eastern coast of the Adriatic, where Dalmazia and Fiume were located, where he proclaimed his republic. The avant-garde in Italy was already manifesting itself aggressively through the futurism of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti – to him he seemed only “a phosphorescent idiot” – and they found in that passion for war an intersection with the nationalist impulses of Enrico Corradini. The exhaustion that constituted that, as well as the glory, deserved a rest in the house in Gardone Riviera that he bought from a German literary critic, whose renovation he commissioned to the architect, friend and later secretary Giancarlo Maroni.
The president of the Foundation, Giordano Bruno Guerri, an enormous intellectual and one of the greatest experts on D’Annunzio, believes that the poet was “a Renaissance character who fell halfway between the 19th and 20th centuries.” “He was a modernizer and an innovator. He didn’t look back. Unfortunately, his identification with fascism diminished his recognition at the time. But today little of that stigma remains. He was a nationalist who was pleased with the duration of fascism, but he detested the same aspects that bother us. He was a libertarian. He was the typical anarchic Italian in the sense of someone who doesn’t follow rules, incapable of doing so. And to someone like that, whom we can define as a genius, it is impossible to attribute an ideology.”
The strength of the author, precisely, is understood before his arrival at the current Vittoriale degli Italiani, on the Lombard side of the lake. In 1914, D’Annunzio was 51 years old and already one of the most famous Italians in the world. He had published novels appreciated by Robert Musil, Marcel Proust and Henry James. He wrote in newspapers—especially in The Corriere della Sera— on any argument with stinging prose and much of his poetic work had already seen the light. Obsessed with women and sex, blind in one eye and only 1.64 meters tall, he entered the world of aristocracy with the help of notable female representatives that he never abandoned. In 1915, when few in Italy knew who Mussolini was, D’Annunzio was already a myth. But his tensions with the dictator kept him away from Rome. His tense relationship with Mussolini, in fact, can be seen from the beginning of the tour of the house, in the so-called mask-maker’s room. A verse by D’Annunzio directly challenges the dictator: “Do you carry the mirror of Narcissus with you? / This is leaded glass, O mask maker. / Adjust your masks to your face, / but remember that you are glass against steel.”
The villa, which had actually been expropriated, then cost him 120,000 lire and today consists of an open-air theater, a cemetery, streets, squares, a river, a hangar and the deck of a frigate placed on top of the gardens. pointing the bow towards Lake Garda. A few kilometers from Saló, where Mussolini would take refuge, establishing the Italian Social Republic a decade later, it should have been the place where the poet and adventurer would retire to live a life away from the spotlight and the halls of power. That was what the dictator wanted, threatened by the fame and magnetism of the writer. The further away – 600 kilometers from Rome – and the happier – with a wonderful mansion surrounded by books – the better. That is why he contributed to the poet receiving the current equivalent of three million euros for the publication of his complete works, money that he could use to reform that kind of cultural and emotional fortress of nine hectares and turn it into a kind of witness to the exuberant personality of the poet, but also of the cultural complexity that accompanied the rise and fall of fascism.
The relationship between the two was cordial at that time. They were on first names. D’Annunzio received great benefits from fascism to maintain that peace, like the military frigate Puglia, disassembled piece by piece and transported to the garden of his house (at the expense of the State). Or a military boat equipped with machine guns and missiles with which he walked around the lake terrorizing the neighbors. Or the honor of being the president of the Academy of Italy and receiving the title the most important poet in the country. It was all entertainment intended to have the party in peace. King Vittorio Emanuele II also granted him the title of Prince of Montenevoso at the suggestion of Mussolini. But even so, the tension was latent. In 1922, D’Annunzio mysteriously fell out of a window of the mansion and was in a coma for a few days. There were two versions. One pointed to his girlfriend at the time, Luisa Baccara, furious because the poet was trying to hook up with her sister. Another suggests that it was a political act to exclude him from a crucial meeting at the gates of October 1922, when the March on Rome, Mussolini’s coronation, took place.
The tour of the house is carried out in strict darkness. The poet, suffering from annoying photophobia due to accidents, only allowed natural light into one of the rooms he used for reading. There, as in other rooms, there are inscriptions and constant references to Dante, whom he considered his ideal teacher, his precursor. “Italian literature begins with 200 verses of Dante and after many centuries it continues with me,” he wrote without false modesty and underlining no less than 700 years of literary emptiness.
The bedroom was simple, austere in amenities. Sleeping was not one of his favorite tasks. French bed. Just for him. Because the place where he received his lovers, often selected from among the women of the town by the governess of the house, was in the wing where his partner lived. A perverse proximity that generated in the poet an increase in libido when he faced these sexual encounters with unknown women. “This house also tells us about the love for beauty and the admiration that Italians have for themselves. Because this house is a celebration of Italian strength, of victory in war, of the taste for nature, of the triumph of architecture… Also of the cult of the past. Look, the mausoleum, for example, is made on the model of the Roman emperors. The amphitheater is made imitating Greco-Roman theaters. This place is also a glorification of all Italian history seen through their eyes,” observes Giordano Bruno Guerra.
D’Annunzio left everything tied up before he died. His body was buried in a mausoleum at the top of the mansion’s gardens, along with some of his friends, also old legionaries who accompanied him in the conquest of Fiume. The poet had also created a Foundation that was to be responsible for the maintenance of the house. But his closeness to fascism jeopardized for a time that the monument would remain intact and not be destroyed by those who had suffered under the regime. In 1975, after years of being visited only privately, it was opened to the public.