Born on this date …

… a most unusual fellow: The allure of D’Annunzio | TLS.

How a rather diminutive poet, novelist and dramatist, with a compulsive urge to transgress, priapic sexual instincts, and a fascination with cruelty, blood and death came to be Italy’s most celebrated man of action and a precursor of Fascism is the subject of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s engrossing and superbly written biography – the first in English since John Woodhouse’s study of 1998. Her aim throughout is to capture the complex and often paradoxical texture of D’Annunzio’s psyche; and her technique is unconventional. She begins with a series of rapid snapshots of the writer’s life from his arrival in Rome in 1881 as a curly-haired faun-like seventeen-year-old prodigy, author of two acclaimed volumes of verse, through to September 1937, when Mussolini stopped at Verona station on his way back from being feted by the Nazis in Berlin to pay homage to the now wizened, bandy-legged and almost toothless national icon. She then begins her narrative in the spring of 1915 with D’Annunzio’s campaign of inflammatory speeches urging Italy to rouse itself from its craven torpor and plunge itself into the maelstrom of war, before turning back to explore in depth how the creator of some of Italy’s most lyrical poetry could arrive at such a juncture from his relatively humble origins in the small provincial town of Pescara on the Adriatic coast.