[7] Although D'Annunzio later preached nationalism and never called himself a fascist, he has been credited with partially inventing Italian fascism,[8] as both his ideas and his aesthetics were an influence upon Benito Mussolini.

At the age of 13, he was adopted by a sister of his mother Rita, Anna Lolli, who had remarried, after the death of her first husband, a wealthy merchant and shipowner, Antonio D'Annunzio.

His verse was so distinguished that the literary critic Giuseppe Chiarini, upon reading it, brought the unknown youth before the public in an enthusiastic article.

[13][14] In 1881, D'Annunzio entered the University of Rome La Sapienza, where he became a member of various literary groups, including Cronaca Bizantina, and wrote articles and criticism for local newspapers.

[citation needed] D'Annunzio published Canto novo (1882), Terra vergine (1882), L'intermezzo di rime (1883), Il libro delle vergini (1884) and the greater part of the short stories that were afterwards collected under the general title of San Pantaleone (1886).

Canto novo contains poems full of pulsating youth and the promise of power, some descriptive of the sea and some of the Abruzzese landscape, commented on and completed in prose by Terra vergine, the latter a collection of short stories dealing in radiant language with the peasant life of the author's native province.

Both style and contents began to startle his critics; some who had greeted him as an enfant prodige rejected him as a perverter of public morals, whilst others hailed him as one bringing a breath of fresh air and an impulse of new vitality into the somewhat prim, lifeless work hitherto produced.

Here he wrote Il libro d'Isotta (1886), a love poem, in which for the first time he drew inspiration adapted to modern sentiments and passions from the rich colours of the Renaissance.

[15] D'Annunzio's poetic work of this period, in most respects his finest, is represented by Il Poema Paradisiaco (1893), the Odi navali (1893), a superb attempt at civic poetry, and Laudi (1900).

In 1898 he wrote his Sogno di un pomeriggio d'autunno and La Gioconda; in the succeeding year La gloria, an attempt at contemporary political tragedy which met with no success, probably because of the audacity of the personal and political allusions in some of its scenes; and then Francesca da Rimini (1901), based on an episode from Dante Alighieri's Inferno; a perfect reconstruction of medieval atmosphere and emotion, magnificent in style, and declared by an authoritative Italian critic – Edoardo Boutet – to be the first real, if imperfect, tragedy ever given to the Italian theatre.

[16] He provided leading roles for her in his plays of the time such as La città morta (1898) and Francesca da Rimini (1901), but the tempestuous relationship finally ended in 1910.

There he collaborated with composer Claude Debussy on a musical play, Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (The Martyrdom of St Sebastian), 1911, written for Ida Rubinstein.

He was welcomed in Pisino by a "pouring of flowers" let down from the windows of the crowded houses,[18] visited the Italian gymnasium and was paid a homage designed by the future wife of Francesco Salata.

[22] Subsequently, he adhered to the mystic and philosophic movimento known as Martinism,[23] collaborating in Fiume with other 33rd degree Scottish Rite Freemasons and occultists like Alceste De Ambris,[24] Sante Ceccherini,[25] and Marco Egidio Allegri.

[citation needed] In February 1918, he took part in a daring, if militarily irrelevant, raid on the harbour of Bakar (known in Italy as La beffa di Buccari, lit.

On 9 August 1918, as commander of the 87th fighter squadron "La Serenissima", he organized one of the great feats of the war, leading nine planes in a 700-mile round trip to drop propaganda leaflets on Vienna.

[29] The war strengthened D'Annunzio's ultranationalist and Italian irredentist views, and he campaigned widely for Italy to assume a role alongside her wartime allies as a first-rate European power.

D'Annunzio ignored the Treaty of Rapallo and declared war on Italy itself, only finally surrendering the city on 29 December 1920 after a bombardment by the Italian navy and five days of fighting.

taken from Achilles's cry in the Iliad, the dramatic and rhetorical dialogue with the crowd, the use of religious symbols in new secular settings,[8] as well as blackshirted followers (the Arditi) with their disciplined, bestial responses and strongarm repression of dissent.

[38][39][40] In his essay "Mussolini and The Cult of the Leader", John Whittam wrote:[41] This famous poet, novelist and war hero was a self-proclaimed Superman.

He held it for over a year and it was he who popularised the black shirts, the balcony speeches, the promulgation of ambitious charters and the entire choreography of street parades and ceremonies.

Although Mussolini's fascism was heavily influenced by the Charter of Carnaro, the constitution for Fiume written by Alceste De Ambris and D'Annunzio, neither wanted to play an active part in the new movement, both refusing when asked by Fascist supporters to run in the elections of 15 May 1921.

Before the March on Rome, De Ambris even went so far as to depict the Italian fascist movement as "a filthy pawn in Mister Giolitti's game of chess, and made out of the least dignified section of the bourgeoisie".

[citation needed] D'Annunzio was seriously injured when he fell out of a window on 13 August 1922; subsequently the planned "meeting for national pacification" with Francesco Saverio Nitti and Mussolini was cancelled.

[43] Three weeks into its December 1901 run at the Teatro Constanzi in Rome, his tragedy Francesca da Rimini was banned by the censor on grounds of morality.

D'Annunzio's literary creations were strongly influenced by the French Symbolist school, and contain episodes of striking violence and depictions of abnormal mental states interspersed with gorgeously imagined scenes.

One of D'Annunzio's most significant novels, scandalous in its day, is Il fuoco (The Flame of Life) of 1900, in which he portrays himself as the Nietzschean Superman (Übermensch) Stelio Effrena, in a fictionalized account of his love affair with Eleonora Duse.

The psychological inspiration of his novels has come to him from many sources—French, Russian, Scandinavian, German—and in much of his earlier work there is little fundamental originality.His creative power is intense and searching, but narrow and personal; his heroes and heroines are little more than one same type monotonously facing a different problem at a different phase of life.

In his later work [meaning as of 1911], when he begins drawing his inspiration from the traditions of bygone Italy in her glorious centuries, a current of real life seems to run through the veins of his personages.

And the lasting merit of D'Annunzio, his real value to the literature of his country, consists precisely in that he opened up the closed mine of its former life as a source of inspiration for the present and of hope for the future, and created a language, neither pompous nor vulgar, drawn from every source and district suited to the requirements of modern thought, yet absolutely classical, borrowed from none, and, independently of the thought it may be used to express, a thing of intrinsic beauty.