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The images and stories of heroes surrounded d’Annunzio as he grew up. The main salon in the d’Annunzio family’s house in Pescara is decorated with a painting of Aeneas. In the background, Troy burns. Aeneas, undismayed, looks stagily outwards to the future, as he sets off to fulfil the great destiny his father Anchises has foreseen for him. So d’Annunzio was to be launched out into the world to fulfil his father’s ambitions.
He was growing up in an heroic age for Italy. The Abruzzi had been a part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled through the middle years of the nineteenth century from Naples by a Bourbon monarchy. Three years before Gabriele’s birth, Garibaldi led his thousand–odd volunteers to Sicily, his numbers swelled by thousands more local supporters, and drove the Bourbon troops, who outnumbered them twenty-six to one, off the island. The King was nervous and vacillating. His officers were hopelessly demoralised. As Garibaldi swept on up through Calabria to Naples, the armies of the teetering monarchy changed sides, or stripped off their uniforms and ran for home. In one of his stories d’Annunzio recreates the scene, which he must have heard repeatedly described, of the day when the fort at Pescara was evacuated and “the troops scattered, throwing their weapons and equipment into the river.”
King Victor Emmanuel of Savoy came south at the head of his army to annex the regions Garibaldi had conquered. Francesco Paolo d’Annunzio was one of the delegation who travelled to his camp at Ancona to invite him to bring his troops into Pescara. When they did so, the King himself (shortly to assume the title of King of All Italy) passed a night under the d’Annunzio family’s roof. In their small way the family had assisted in the making of the Italian nation state.
It was the first age of mass reproduction. Prints of Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel adorned the walls of houses all over the peninsula, revered much as sacred paintings were revered. In d’Annunzio’s home they were juxtaposed with depictions of the exploits of classical heroes: it was as though the time for glorious deeds had come again. When Gabriele was seven years old the French withdrew their support for the Pope’s temporal power, and Victor Emmanuel’s troops marched into Rome. The state of Italy, independent and united, was complete. Years later d’Annunzio was to recall being wakened, after going to bed that September evening, by people parading though the streets with lighted torches, by raucous songs, fanfares of trumpets and cries of “Rome!”
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When he was eleven, d’Annunzio was sent to a boarding school, the Royal College of the Cicognini at Prato, which was considered to be the finest in Italy. Francesco Paolo wanted him to be “Tuscanised.” The Tuscan dialect, the language of Dante and Machiavelli and Lorenzo the Magnificent, was to be the language of the new Italy’s elite.
The Cicognini is grand but grim. Behind its eighteenth-century façade lie long corridors, with vaulted ceilings and wrought-iron lanterns. There is a chapel and an elegant little theatre, but there is little to make a boy feel at home. Gabriele felt the misery of boarding-school children everywhere. In writing his recollections of his years there, he describes the college as his “prison.” He recalls the gloom with which he walked back through its “sad portal” after the daily walk and the relief, on his few exeats, of escaping from its atmosphere of confinement and prohibition. He was not allowed back to Pescara, even for the long summer holidays, for four whole years.
Children obliged to fend for themselves in a loveless environment grow a shell around their hearts which can be hard to crack open later. D’Annunzio matured into an adult notably lacking in empathy, an exploitative friend, an unreliable lover and a negligent father, for whom people en masse seemed no more interesting than herds of cattle. Some at least of his emotional frigidity can probably be ascribed to his early banishment to school. At the time, though, he responded to his spartan treatment, not only dutifully, but with fervid enthusiasm and declarations of love. The mission that had been laid upon him, that of making a prodigy of himself, was one he accepted enthusiastically. In his first year he wrote to tell his “dearest Daddy” he was top of his class. “Oh how sweetly these words flash from my lips, what joy I’m feeling now I have made your wish come true.”
Already, as a schoolboy, he was a passionate little patriot. He wrote, aged thirteen, that he had two missions: “To teach the people to love their country … and to hate the enemies of Italy to the death!” The shrillness was not peculiar to him. Italy was an unstable new amalgam of regions with widely differing histories. Its peoples, whose dialects differed so markedly as to make them in many cases unintelligible to each other, were going to need to be taught to love it. Italian nationalism was both anxious and bellicose. The late nineteenth century was, for all Europeans, a nationalist age, but for newly forged, insecurely unified nations—Germany and Italy prominent among them—it was one where a simple loyalty to the state was linked to a complex web of quasi-religious, quasi-erotic impulses, among them the yearning for heroes to worship. For d’Annunzio those vaguely defined but extreme emotions coalesced around the idea of his own “high destiny.”
Francesco Paolo and Gabriele alike believed in that destiny. Aged fifteen, the son wrote to the father: “I love praise, because I know that you will enjoy praise offered to me; I love glory because I know that you exult to hear glory attached to my name.”
Glory, glory, glory: the word tolls through his adolescent correspondence. “He is entirely dedicated,” reads one of his school reports, “to making a great name for himself.” An early photograph shows a curly-haired teenager, his expression solemn, his eyes fixed. It is inscribed, in his own hand, with “To Glory.” His path there would be literary, but he prepared himself for it with the kind of self-punishing dedication that a religious novice might devote to asceticism, or a would-be soldier to physical training.
The standard curriculum was not enough. He learned to play the violin and the flute. He took singing lessons. He set himself holiday tasks—the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the compilation of a book of “observations.” When the signal was given for the end of evening study, and the rest of the boys prepared for bed, he went around collecting the others’ left-over lamp oil so that he could work far into the night. He wrote to tell his father he was top of the class again, adding, “If you knew what it had cost me to reach that position!” He saw himself as a hero who bore the marks of his exploits written on his body. His left shoulder, he wrote later, was lower than the other, so many hours had he spent, as a growing boy, hunched over his desk.
When he was permitted to bypass an exam, he wrote to tell his mother how disappointed he was, “I am certain I would have taken first place.” When he was sixteen he wrote six letters to his parents for Easter, one in Italian, the others in Greek, Latin, English, French and Spanish. The great book he felt certain he would write one day, was, he wrote, a “peak” he would climb.
The College of the Cicognini was run on military lines. The boys wore smart little uniforms, turquoise trousers and tunics with frogging and epaulettes. They were students, but they were also toy soldiers. They were drawn up into two “companies,” each consisting of four “squads,” and well-behaved boys were honoured with officer status. In his second year d’Annunzio was made a “corporal.” Three years later he was promoted to the rank of “sergeant” and in his last winter at the school he became “commandant” (the title he would give himself at Fiume). The boys’ days were punctuated by drum rolls announcing the beginning and end of lessons and study periods; their exercise was drill, their excursions were route marches, their games were battles, their heroes were conquerors.
The study of the classics took up a high proportion of the students’ time. So it did at schools all over the Western world, but for an Italian child Latin literature and Roman history had a potent local significance. British schoolboys might be encouraged to cultivate the stoic virtues the Roman Republic had borrowed from Sparta, and to trace the similarities between Roman stoicism and late-Victorian stiff-upper-lippe
ry. They might identify the British Empire with the Roman one, and, reading Macaulay’s Lays, compare the dogged courage of his Roman heroes with that of Britain’s own colonial officers. For Italian children no such imaginative effort was required. In Plutarch’s Lives, they found the stories of Italy’s own native heroes. Reading Ovid and Horace they were studying the poets whose genius constituted part of their own nation’s claim to greatness. Virgil’s Aeneid described the founding of the state which—after a hiatus lasting a dozen centuries—had newly re-emerged. Livy and Caesar told how that state had fought and conquered. Tacitus (this was especially pleasing) described how the Italians/Romans had defeated the Germanic peoples to the north, the forebears of the Austrians who had, in the boys’ parents’ and teachers’ lifetimes, ruled most of northern Italy. Towards the end of d’Annunzio’s life, Mussolini was to make a public cult of Romanità. To a child educated as d’Annunzio was, that cult was no artificially imposed construct, but a cluster of associations which had shaped his sense of history and his notions of virtue from the very beginnings of his intellectual life.
Glory was not confined to antiquity. For nineteenth-century Europeans the great conqueror was Napoleon. In a world where, as Thomas Carlyle lamented in 1848, great men were scarce, the memory of Napoleon’s rise from modest beginnings to become a Europe-bestriding superman was inspirational. Even those for whom he had been unequivocally the enemy (Englishmen like Byron, Russians like Tolstoy) were fascinated by him. For Italians it was even possible, with a little patriotic sophistry, to claim him as one of their own. One could dwell, not on the French Bonaparte’s invasion of Italy at the head of a French army, but on the Corsican Buonaparte’s success (however temporary) in driving out the hated Austrians. Napoleon had called upon Italians to rise up together, to unite. He had given them their tricolour flag. True, he had pillaged their art galleries and made their principalities perks for his relatives, but Italy could console itself by claiming a part in his glory.
Francesco Paolo d’Annunzio made use of his numinous memory in his efforts to make a hero of his son. Visiting Gabriele in Prato, he brought him a coin, bearing the image of Napoleon as King of Italy, and the Mémorial de St. Hélène by the Comte de Las Cases. The count was one of Napoleon’s aides and was with the fallen emperor on his prison-island. His eight-volume memoir was a tremendous bestseller, and the essential source book for the cult of Bonapartism. Reading it, d’Annunzio became obsessed. He established the first of his many collections, a hotch-potch of rags and horseshoe nails; he called it his “reliquary.” He became a worshipper, not of God, but of “Our Lord, who was called Napoleon Bonaparte.”
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The teachers he found in Prato did not meet with d’Annunzio’s approval. He wrote to his old Abruzzese tutor complaining that “soft, plump” priests could teach him nothing. Hard working he might be, but docile he was not. His memoirs of his schooldays describe the time he climbed out onto the roof and stayed there for a day and a night, and the food-slinging battles in the refectory, in which he was one of the warring generals. He was a rebel, in approved romantic tradition; brilliant but unruly.
He was aware, though, that he needed guidance and sponsorship. Francesco Paolo did what he could, but d’Annunzio wanted more fathers, influential older men with connections in the great world of letters, who could help him on. With breathtaking self-confidence, he set about creating for himself a kind of inverted academy, one where, instead of a sage and those eager to learn from him, there was to be just one student—himself—and an illustrious team of sages.
At the age of fifteen he was at last allowed home for the summer. Stopping over in Bologna on his way back to school he bought a copy of Carducci’s Odi Barbare (Barbarian Odes). Giosuè Carducci was Italy’s acknowledged master poet. His manner was famously brusque. His views were contrarian. Attacking Christian values in general and the Catholic Church in particular, he was the most eloquent Italian advocate for a return to the holy sensuality of paganism (a theme English aesthetes, Pater and Swinburne among them, had already explored). His most celebrated work was entitled Hymn to Satan. D’Annunzio, the boy who jeered at God, was immediately impressed by Carducci’s work, and set himself to imitate it. A few months later he wrote to the great man, using the vocabulary not of a student but of a warrior. He felt vibrating though all his fibres “the genius of battles,” inflaming him with a mania for “glory and hard blows”: “I want to fight at your side, O Poet!”
Carducci does not appear to have replied to this oddly belligerent fan letter. D’Annunzio had begun by imploring him not to “consider me a presumptuous boy, as empty as the peel of a squeezed lemon” who wrote to the famous just so that he could boast of their correspondence. There would have been little reason at this point why Carducci should think him anything else. Soon though, d’Annunzio would begin to prove himself.
His first poem to appear in print was an ode written in the month he turned sixteen, and addressed to King Umberto. Francesco Paolo had it printed, and he distributed copies to the people assembled to listen to the band playing in Pescara’s main piazza on the King’s birthday. A few months later, Gabriele’s first volume of poems, Primo Vere—a title punning on the words for “spring” and “first verses”—was published (again at his father’s expense). D’Annunzio himself described the poems as “rosy flashes of youthful life,” full of “sky-blue serenity and smoky darkness.” Their subject matter was so erotic, so perverse, that the teachers at the Cicognini wondered whether they ought to ban the volume from being brought into the school, or even perhaps expel d’Annunzio, brilliant student though he was. His subject matter was disgraceful: “With trembling agitation I laid you on the water lilies and kissed you with convulsed lips, crying ‘You are mine!’…Like a viper, you writhed and groaned.” But his command of syntax was perfect, his employment of classical verse-forms correct. He was allowed to stay on.
Carducci had ignored his letter, but d’Annunzio had his calling card now. Still at school, still only sixteen, he made overtures to another distinguished stranger. Enrico Nencioni was a critic and lover of English literature. D’Annunzio wrote to him from school—“my sad prison”—enclosing Primo Vere. Nencioni invited the boy to visit him in Florence, a conveniently short train ride from Prato. Soon the two, despite an age gap of nearly twenty-six years, were close friends.
Nencioni was lanky and nervous. He had long hands with which he gestured expansively as he recited poetry and “something tremulous about his every attitude.” D’Annunzio was to liken their relationship to that of Socrates with the beautiful Alcibiades, the lordly youth with whom the philosopher was besotted. Nencioni’s influence on the young poet was immense. Much later, d’Annunzio described the day they first met as a kind of religious rite of passage, his “confirmation.”
Nencioni showed him prints of pre-Raphaelite paintings by Burne-Jones and Rossetti. He advised him to read Walter Pater, an Oxford don whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance (first published in 1873, the year before d’Annunzio went to the Cicognini) was to provide the English aesthetes, and d’Annunzio himself, with their creed. The book combined a re-evaluation of the art-historical canon (it was Pater who promoted Botticelli to the small number of the acknowledged great) with fervent declarations of faith in the value of beauty and passion. Life is short: “A counted number of pulses are given to us of a variegated, dramatic life.” Nothing—certainly not convention or received morality—should hold the aesthete back from pulsating with ardour, from burning, in Pater’s most famous phrase, with a “hard gem-like flame.” D’Annunzio was a receptive student. All his life he would pride himself on his wide-openness to each transient pleasure, each glimpse of loveliness.
Nencioni introduced him to the works of Thomas Carlyle, whose On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History would confirm d’Annunzio’s veneration for great men, and reinforce his conviction that it was not economic forces, as the socialists maintained, but the actions of sup
erb individuals that shaped human history. Under Nencioni’s tutelage he read Keats, whose voluptuous way with words he was to emulate, and, with especial enthusiasm, the two English Romantics who had spent large part of their adult lives in Italy: Shelley and Byron. There are some traces of their poetry’s influence in his, but it was what he learned of their personalities and their politics which seemed most significant for him. Later in life he owned a ring which he claimed had belonged to Byron, and liked to dwell on how much he and Byron had in common: their prowess at swimming; their periods of “exile” (self-inflicted in both cases); their love of Venice; their promiscuity; their prodigious fame.
Both Shelley and Byron were aristocrats who had scandalised their compatriots, defying convention and cutting themselves off from home and family. Both were passionately political. Shelley’s radical egalitarianism didn’t chime with d’Annunzio’s veneration for imperial glory, but his impatience with the dreariness and moral corruption of everyday life, his striving after visions of transcendental glory, excited d’Annunzio immeasurably. “He fights for light,” wrote d’Annunzio, against “law, faith, tyranny, superstition.” He was a demi-god, “one of the greatest poets in the world.”
Byron was an even more alluring model. He was remembered as the sexually irresistible libertine, an aspect of his fame intensely interesting to the teenage d’Annunzio. He was also a poet whose work had brought him large sums of money and—even more enticingly—the kind of celebrity previously only enjoyed by victorious warriors or heads of state. He was politically active. In the early 1820s, living in Venice, Byron had contacts with the Carbonari (the “charcoal burners”), the Italian nationalists whose outlawed revolutionary organisation was a precursor of the movement that, a quarter of a century later, would become the Italian Risorgimento. He had called the vision of a free and united Italy the “very poetry of politics.” Thrillingly for d’Annunzio, his example suggested that a poet could also be a hero, that poetry and politics could merge, and lead on to glory.
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