Gabriele D'Annunzio

Independent activity Nationalism 1863–1938 ○ Stroke

Poet who seized Fiume and ruled the Regency of Carnaro, a nationalist whose style and ideas helped shape Fascism

Born in Pescara, he was the leading decadent poet and playwright of Italian literature from 1889 to 1910. In the First World War he was associated with the Arditi shock troops and the flight over Vienna and became a national war hero. Reacting against the Paris Peace Conference, in September 1919 he led his "legionaries" into Fiume and, as Duce, set up the Italian Regency of Carnaro under the corporatist Charter of Carnaro, until the army and naval guns of Giolitti's government drove him out in December 1920. Though he never called himself a fascist, he is credited with partially inventing Italian fascism, as his ideas and aesthetics influenced Mussolini. He retired to Lake Garda and died in 1938.