Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Notturno,the book of the Italian war: Political commitment,national regeneration and its ideological roots

The Notturno and its myth

Since its publication and even more since its first presentation to the public, ¹ the Notturno has been received as collecting the memories and intimate visions in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s mind when he was bedridden for about two months after an air crash during the First World War. D’Annunzio suffered a trauma to his right eye on 16 January 1916 when he was attempting a reconnaissance flight with the Macchi seaplane L1 piloted by Luigi Bologna. A technical malfunction forced the pilot to fly back to the base in Grado and to perform an emergency water landing (Historical Archive MMI, 1916). ² Because of the reflection of the sun on the water surface, the landing was rather rough and d’Annunzio hit his right temple against the machine gun of the plane (Montanarella d’Annunzio, 1948: 16 January 1916). That caused a retinal detachment for which d’Annunzio sought medical help only a month later. On 21 February 1916, the oculists he consulted prescribed a cure in a useless attempt to save his right eye and to prevent infection of the other eye (Albertotti, 1925). During this treatment, d’Annunzio was forced to lie down in a dark room. He could not move or see, but nonetheless he managed to write on thin strips of paper.

In his poetic representation of the genesis of his book, d’Annunzio emphasizes the symbolic relevance of the act of writing in the darkness. Therefore, he makes his readers believe that he has composed the whole book during the weeks he spent in bed. ³ Indeed, in the Post Scriptum to the Notturno, he declares that the book was written ‘on more than ten thousand strips of paper’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 289). ⁴ The idea that the book was written from the author’s sickbed on ‘thousands of scraps of paper’ (Jewiss, 2011: VII) and that those strips correspond to the entire book is still endorsed by less attentive scholars and editors. In reality, d’Annunzio wrote about 2500 strips between February and April 1916 ⁵ and those strips correspond to only a part of the book, which instead was conceived before the accident and was written throughout the First World War and in the wake of the Fiume Exploit until October 1921. ⁶

It is therefore erroneous to read the Notturno as a book of visions and memories inspired by the infirmity of the author. On the contrary, as this article argues, the Notturno is no intimate interlude in d’Annunzio’s production but a war diary, and, as such, it is a fundamentally political work. Moreover, the political message of the Notturno is consequent with d’Annunzio’s long-lasting political commitment to the nation. In what follows, we will show how war-related contents are displayed, why we consider the book as d’Annunzio’s account of the Italian war (which includes, in his eyes, the Fiume Exploit) and hence how the Notturno is related to d’Annunzio’s political project for the nation at the time when the book was composed (1915–1921). Our first aim is to endorse a more historically and literary correct interpretation of the book’s political value. Our second aim is to contextualize this value in the commitment to the cause of Italy underlying d’Annunzio’s works since the 1880s, a commitment which is based on the revalorization of the Italian national past. In particular, we will focus on his interpretation of the 16th century and on his renewal of the national storytelling of the Risorgimento.

When and how the Notturno was composed

The Notturno, published on 22 November 1921 in Milan by Treves, is d’Annunzio’s last huge editorial success. ⁷ This success is due to two extra-literary factors. On the one hand, d’Annunzio had won acclaim beyond the literary sphere and was rewarded with unprecedented, although controversial, popularity for his participation in the national war effort and his leadership in the Fiume Exploit. On the other hand, as mentioned, since 1916, he had related the book to the paper strips that had allowed him to write in the darkness, and used these circumstances as a promotional strategy to advertise the book in 1921. This prompted the attention of the public and widely spread the myth of the book’s alleged origin in the darkness, which persists in the popular reception and even in some academic accounts of the book to this day. This reception overshadows the true nature of the text, although the truthfulness of the genesis and the content of the book have been assessed by Riccardi (1986, 1987, 1988, 2009) and Santi (2008), ⁸ who expose the enduring misinterpretation of the text. While Riccardi reconstructs the genesis of the book, Santi analyses its themes and links its redactional history to d’Annunzio’s biography. Yet, the political value of the book has not been sufficiently explored. In what follows, we will explore d’Annunzio’s representation of the First World War and Fiume in the Notturno. In order to tackle its political nature, it is necessary to recall some crucial passages of its redactional history and its content.

Riccardi (1986) shows that the paper strips written during d’Annunzio’s infirmity form part of a project that he already had in mind before being bedridden for two months. This project was from the very beginning related to d’Annunzio’s First World War experience. Indeed, d’Annunzio sketched the first drafts of the war stories that appear in the Notturno between 1914 and 1915, when he visited the French front and when he joined the Italian army.

At the end of 1915, d’Annunzio conceived the Notturno as an appendix to the short story Leda without Swan (1913), to which eventually he decided to add another text, the Licence (1916). By March 1916, the Notturno became a book project in its own right; yet, until the very last weeks before its publication, it remained a work in progress for which Riccardi identifies six distinct redactional phases: the first stretches from December 1915 to January 1916; the second corresponds to the phase of the paper strips, from 21 February to 21 April 1916; the third runs from spring to autumn 1916; the fourth from autumn 1916 to spring 1917; the fifth in 1918; and the sixth and last between September and October 1921 (Riccardi, 2009: 96).

The Notturno, as we said, is basically a diary, but this statement must be understood in two different ways. At a fictional level, the book is a diary of d’Annunzio’s illness and confinement to bed. It opens in medias res as d’Annunzio writes the very first phrase on a paper strip. Then, the plot follows the course of his illness until the spring of 1916, when the doctors acquaint d’Annunzio with the definitive loss of his right eye and he can leave his bed for the first time to begin his convalescence. At the same time, at an ideological level, if we consider the redactional phases and relate them to the content that each phase puts forward, as we will do, the Notturno can be read as the diary of d’Annunzio’s participation in the First World War up to his retreat from Fiume.

In other words, the diary of the illness constitutes the plot of the book, but it is limited to the few weeks d’Annunzio spent in bed and follows the chronology of the cure from its first days until the beginning of d’Annunzio’s convalescence in Easter 1916. This plot is interspersed with digressions that depict either memories of the past or visions occurring in d’Annunzio’s mind. These digressions are short narrations mostly related to war episodes preceding the illness. As Riccardi puts it, d’Annunzio’s eye injury becomes the narrative structure into which he inserts these notes (Riccardi, 2009: 70). Since this narrative structure ends on Easter Sunday of 1916, d’Annunzio can only recall episodes that do not exceed this temporal boundary. However, the meaning behind these digressions reflects his ideology of the moment in which the different parts of the text were written, that is both before and after Easter 1916 up to 1921.

Therefore, in addition to the episodes recalling the first months of war, the book includes narrative fragments which d’Annunzio cannot explicitly link to the war experience after Easter 1916 (because of the fictional boundaries), but nevertheless those fragments convey d’Annunzio’s most interesting thoughts (post Easter 1916) about his fight for Italy. For example, d’Annunzio’s main concern by the end of the First World War is that he has been unable to sacrifice himself for the cause of Italy. He regrets that he could not end his life with the highest national acknowledgement: to become a national hero. After the Fiume Exploit, this personal delusion is exacerbated by the betrayal of the territorial expectations he, and many like him, had when entering the conflict, and by the institutional ratification of the Treaty of Versailles (1919). ⁹ For this reason, he ends the book by telling a short story that mirrors his resentment against the national institutions and his need to find a new heroic challenge.

The story is about a peasant, a projection of d’Annunzio (as he explicitly says), who sacrifices himself to save his country: having seen his country’s army retreat across a ford to escape the oncoming enemy, the peasant is forced to indicate the location of the ford to the arriving enemy. Entering the river, the peasant bends his legs, pretending that the water is deeper than it is and letting the river wash over him. While the enemy is stuck on the bank, the peasant dies saving his country. The most important aspects of this highly symbolic story are, firstly, that the peasant’s sacrifice will never be acknowledged because it happens outside of the battlefield. Secondly, the peasant is a civilian, and moreover the first and only civilian character to perform a heroic act in the Notturno and, remarkably, a figure in whose death d’Annunzio mirrors his own heroic quest. Indeed, d’Annunzio declares that the story answers the fundamental question he asks himself at the end of the book: ‘but what if there were an even better way to die?’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 287). ¹⁰ The question deals explicitly with how one can serve one’s country when failing to sacrifice oneself on the battlefield. Yet, the sombre tone of this ending is incoherent with d’Annunzio’s feelings by Easter 1916. At the time he does not know yet if he will fly again, but he is sure he will go back to the front and the diary of the illness expresses nothing but d’Annunzio’s hope to be released and to re-join his comrades. However, considering that the passage was written in 1921, we can affirm that here d’Annunzio does not project the impatience to go back to war he felt in 1916, but rather the delusion he suffered and the need to open a new political chapter after the setback of 1920. Only if we bear in mind that the ending was written in 1921 can we understand that the theme of heroic death changes throughout the years and that the Notturno takes a turn which would be inexplicable in 1916. In the last sequence, indeed, d’Annunzio says that the soldier is not the only one who can achieve heroism and that sacrifice can be performed outside of combat. Hence, the question ‘but what if there were an even better way to die?’ implicitly deals with how one can serve one’s country when the institutions betray the national cause. D’Annunzio’s answer is that there can be a different path to patriotic heroism which is located beyond the army and outside institutional acknowledgment. D’Annunzio therefore implies that his quest for glory from 1921 will take place in another way and in other forms than those experienced before 1921. This is diametrically opposed to what he states in the fragments of the first redactional phases.

This marks an extremely important turning point in d’Annunzio’s representation of war and heroism, since before the Fiume Exploit he completely adhered to the institutional representation of national heroism in the First World War. This implicit disdain towards the institutions is anticipated in a more subtle way in a passage that precedes the story of the peasant and that was written in the same redactional phase, the last one of 1921. D’Annunzio represents a fellow aviator, Oreste Salomone, and defines Salomone’s military decoration as ‘a slender band of azure silk’ ‘that reduces the glorious sky where the aviators fight’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 184). ¹¹ This definition undermines the value of the institutional acknowledgment of heroism that d’Annunzio had lauded before 1921. Indeed, after the government’s opposition to the annexation of Fiume, d’Annunzio blatantly discarded the military honours he had received for his service in the Italian army. As a result, the meaning of the book’s conclusion (detachment from the institutions, personal bitterness), which was written in 1921, is anachronistic to the fictional reality, which unfolds in 1916 (when hope and institutional commitment prevail) but is consistent with a later stage of d’Annunzio’s interpretation of war and political actions.

In other words, even if the diary of d’Annunzio’s illness could not represent events that took place after 1916, because of its own chronological boundaries, underpinning this narrative is a much longer time span that lasts until 1921. In the same way, many of the visions and memories of a remote past are not merely lyrical excursions in d’Annunzio’s psychology, but transfigurations of his war experiences and his ideological and political stands after April 1916. In sum, the book evolves until the year of its publication with d’Annunzio deciding, in 1916, to build a plot related to his illness which he then gradually increases through added digressions over the next five years. This affects the meaning of the book, suggesting that it is a book devoted to war, set in 1916 but not rigidly related to d’Annunzio’s ideology in 1916. However, because of the myth of its genesis in the darkness, the complexity and real meaning of this book, as a war diary, have been overlooked for almost 80 years.

The Notturno as the book of the Italian war

Since the redactional process spans almost seven years (from 1915 to 1921), the Notturno collects the whole of d’Annunzio’s reflections on war, on his own war experience and on the collective value of the national war. These fundamental features of the book have been overlooked because the book’s historical references have been largely ignored. Therefore, the critical mainstream did not grasp the Notturno’s historical value and its political meaning. Moreover, because of this reception, especially in the first decennia after its publication, the Notturno has not permeated Italian First World War storytelling, and d’Annunzio’s mark on the common Italian imaginary regarding the First World War stems from his other writings of the period rather than from the Notturno. However, as the only great, yet unacknowledged narration of the Italian war from an interventionist and left-militarist point of view, the book gives voice to the Italian intellectuals who conceived of the First World War as the fourth Risorgimento war, who never contested the war’s legitimacy and were disappointed by the outcome of the international treaties after the war.

Elaborating on Santi’s (2008) analysis of the book, we will now show that every single narrative element of it, even the furthest childhood memories, revolves around the topic of war. The book is divided into three main sections called Offerings, which are divided into sequences, each with their own internal structural and thematic coherence (Santi, 2004a, 2008). There are three sequences in the First Offering, eight in the Second Offering and seven in the Third Offering. Every single sequence contains a variable number of textual fragments, since the book has no traditional narrative structure but is divided into fragments of varying length.

The First Offering begins in medias res with a sequence in which d’Annunzio describes how he wrote the text – in darkness while lying in bed – and introduces the primary plot – the diary of the illness – as well as the main theme of the book, which is sacrifice for the nation. ¹² Indeed, the whole book revolves around a question that d’Annunzio raises in the very first sentence he writes on the strips of paper: ‘Why have you twice let me down?’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 10). ¹³ As d’Annunzio puts it in the Licence, this ‘question which intones the Notturno’ (d’Annunzio, 2005c: 999) ¹⁴ rests on the notion that d’Annunzio felt he had been let down twice by death because destiny had taken his comrades but had left him alive.

This double delusion concerns two war events. The first time death took away d’Annunzio’s pilot, Giuseppe Miraglia, on 21 September 1915 during a test flight on the eve of a raid over Zadar which they had planned together. Miraglia’s death deprived d’Annunzio of both the raid, where he had hoped to find a glorious death, and of his companion, with whom he had searched for a heroic death in combat. The second time death thwarted d’Annunzio was on 18 February 1916, when he failed to partake in a raid over Ljubljana. During the expedition, two members of the crew on the plane in which d’Annunzio was supposed to fly, Alfredo Barbieri and Luigi Bailo, lost their lives. The only survivor, Oreste Salomone, the plane’s pilot, suffered an injury but succeeded in bringing the aircraft back to base.

The second and third sequences of the First Offering (written between December 1915 and January 1916) depict the days before and after Miraglia’s death: the second sequence from 20 to 24 December 1915 and the third from 26 December 1915. They represent d’Annunzio among the officials who serve on the navy’s seaplanes stationed in Venice. These two sequences present a crucial theme in the book, namely death in war. This theme is treated in a unique way particular to this book and in contrast to European institutional and literary war storytelling.

The first sequence of the Second Offering addresses the second delusion, the death of the flight crew in the raid over Ljubljana, and represents d’Annunzio among the men who fly with the army’s biplanes stationed in the airfield of Gonars, close to Udine. The First Offering and the beginning of the Second Offering revolve around the question of what happens if one does not succeed in becoming a martyr in the fight for one’s country. Those sequences are written in the early stage of the redactional process and represent, on the one hand, d’Annunzio’s first encounter with death in war and, on the other hand, his impatience to achieve glory in a military mission. After that, d’Annunzio takes centre stage and reflects more explicitly about himself in relation to the cause of the war.

Indeed, the second sequence of the Second Offering (which was integrated into the text in 1917) recalls the interventionist campaign of May 1915, describing d’Annunzio as a leader and orator in two addresses to crowds in Rome and Milan, and recalling the mysticism of collective sacrifice that inspired his interventionist speeches. Two themes emerge in this sequence: on the one hand, d’Annunzio stresses his long-lasting political commitment to the Italian cause: ‘my thirty years of constancy, my love and passion for beautiful Italy’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 72). ¹⁵ On the other hand, d’Annunzio affirms his role as a guide for the nation on its path to war. In 1917, a peculiarly difficult year for the Italian army, d’Annunzio feels the need to reassess the reasons that brought Italy to war and to reinforce the national cohesion by remembering the popular support for the war. Moreover, while representing himself in May 1915, d’Annunzio foregrounds his role as the leader of a nation in arms, a role that he mainly consolidates in the second half of the First World War.

In the third sequence of the Second Offering the focus seemingly shifts away from the topic of war, but even this sequence is related to war. The sequence opens with the description of a bunch of flowers brought to d’Annunzio’s bed. The flowers bring consolatory memories of the past, as opposed to the present suffering of the injured writer. The sequence ends with a reflection on the meaning of his suffering and the mutilation of his eye within the context of the national war. As d’Annunzio asks himself ‘Why do I wish to recover?’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 90), ¹⁶ the theme of mutilation emerges as a variation on the theme of the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of one’s country, and d’Annunzio wonders if it is meaningful for him to recover and take back the eye he has given for his country.

Here the Notturno takes a turn, since d’Annunzio understands that to sacrifice oneself means to fully embrace not only death but also mutilation. If death has let him down, concludes d’Annunzio, he can still accept this alternative form of sacrifice. Moreover, his painful illness must be borne as an offer in itself and must be endured to save the other eye and so return to the battlefield. At this point, d’Annunzio recalls his first medical visit to a field hospital treating soldiers with eye injuries. The fact that he describes the injured soldiers who gather around his bed as his brothers (d’Annunzio, 2011: 91) explicitly underlines how patriotic sacrifice unites them, and the sequence ends on this image of brotherhood in war. Those passages have been written after the end of the treatment, therefore they deal with the loss of the eye and the need to embrace glory in its various forms and not only as sacrifice of life (see below the topic of the mutilated soldiers); secondly, when d’Annunzio writes those passages he is mainly active with infantry and pays his literary tribute to the humble soldiers.

While the third sequence deals with the theme of the sacrificed eye, the fourth sequence, composed in 1921, develops the theme of sacrifice by recalling the figure of d’Annunzio’s mother, who becomes a symbol of the nation. Thereby, d’Annunzio recalls an image of the nation that is very common in both Risorgimento and First World War iconography, that of the ‘immortal mother’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 105). ¹⁷ However, at this stage, the symbol of the mother primarily foregrounds a subjective relation with the country and an individualistic quest for the national cause that matches d’Annunzio’s detachment from the institutions after 1920. Indeed, in d’Annunzio’s eyes the national institutions have betrayed both the mortal and the immortal mother.

The fifth sequence of the Second Offering, of which two thirds were composed in 1921 and the rest between 1916/1917 and 1918, is the most varied and complex of the entire book. In this sequence, d’Annunzio’s daughter emerges as a relevant figure. She embodies the trope of the war nurse and takes over the protective role of the mother. At the same time, she embodies the spirit of nature renewing itself and announcing a return to life which in the Notturno means a return to combat.

As stated above, the main fictional plot limits the narrative timespan to the beginning of 1916. Between the beginning of the war and the beginning of 1916, d’Annunzio fought mainly with the flying units of the navy and the army, while his most important war actions in the trenches and on the sea took place from the second half of 1916 onwards. In the Notturno, d’Annunzio aims to represent his entire war experience and therefore behind the few episodes he can actually narrate he conceals his later war experiences.

For this reason, d’Annunzio reports in the sixth sequence of the Second Offering (drafted in 1915 and developed for inclusion in the Notturno in 1921) the naval expedition in the bay of Panzano, which occurred on 18–19 August 1915, and in the seventh sequence, written in 1921, he tells of the artillery combat of 18 October 1915 on Morosina island. Scholars have stressed the limited military relevance of these episodes, and these passages have been quoted to downplay d’Annunzio’s participation in the war and to ridicule his figure as a soldier; nevertheless, they actually mirror other and much more relevant war episodes.

At the end of the war memories of Panzano and Morosina, d’Annunzio narrates a visit paid to him by the Italian war hero Umberto Cagni. Cagni was an Admiral of the Italian Military Navy and a former explorer, leading famous expeditions to Alaska (1897), the North Pole (1899–1900) and Africa (1906): d’Annunzio had already celebrated Cagni’s expedition to the North Pole, where Cagni had painfully amputated his own finger, in the Canzone di Umberto Cagni (Merope). The fragments dedicated to Cagni state that heroic sacrifice (of a finger and of an eye) unites Cagni and d’Annunzio, but when the hero talks to d’Annunzio, the latter has a moment of weakness during which he can hardly bear his own sacrifice. This means that in order to be like Cagni, in order to be a national hero, d’Annunzio still has to walk a long path of sacrifice and endure his suffering for much longer. This sequence too belongs to the last redactional phase and stresses the loneliness of the path to sacrifice in opposition to the sequences of the first redactional years, where sacrifice was sought within the military institutions and together with other soldiers (see below the topic of the dead heroes and the male bonding).

Pursuing the same theme, the eighth sequence closes the Second Offering with an allegory of fire as an image of heroic sacrifice. The representation of a burning French pine forest becomes an allegory for sacrifice and combat. At this point, it becomes clear that these memories return from the past to inspire d’Annunzio in his present and lonely struggle, because the flames ‘are violent and tenacious, impetuous and constant [and] teach one how to fight’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 182). ¹⁸

The Third Offering begins with an introductory part which presents d’Annunzio in his bed suffering because of the treatments prescribed by his doctors. The introductory part is followed by seven sequences. The second and fourth sequences follow the evolution of the illness and recall several themes connected to the illness and to the visions across the whole book. The fifth sequence also repeats themes related to the previous sacrifices, without substantially changing the meaning of the book. If those sequences merely increase the number of pages of the book, the other four sequences of the Third Offering, related to war, bring about another shift in the book’s meaning.

The first sequence of the Third Offering (which was composed after 1917) is dedicated to the death of Luigi Bresciani, who died in an airplane crash on 4 April 1916. Like Miraglia and Barbieri, he was an officer close to d’Annunzio in the first months of war. Therefore, after Giuseppe Miraglia in the First Offering and Alfredo Barbieri in the Second Offering, the Third Offering is also dedicated to a fellow aviator who has become a martyr for the country. This means that even in the darkest time war heroes, those who never betrayed the country and died for the right cause, must be remembered and celebrated as true heroes and worthy comrades in the struggle.

The third sequence must be read as an allegory revolving around the image of horses: d’Annunzio first recalls the Arabian El-Nar which he rode through an Egyptian rose garden in 1899. The wild and reckless horse that gallops through the thorns of the roses portrays d’Annunzio as he tries to dominate, mortify and purify his own sensuality. Sensuality is a recurring theme in the book and is always related to war and to war mysticism. Indeed, d’Annunzio stresses how a soldier needs to dominate their sensual and sexual instincts, since they are misleading and impede full devotion to the patriotic cause. After this, d’Annunzio recalls the horses at the French front, recorded in his notebook on 17 and 20 September 1914: he was allowed to visit the front in Meaux, Vareddes, Etrépilly, Vincy, Rozoy, Corcy, Villers, Crepy-en-Valois and Senlis after the first battle of the Marne (6–12 September 1914), where he saw the horses ‘dead, slaughtered, butchered en masse’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 228). ¹⁹ These horses become an image of the massacres in the trenches that d’Annunzio personally witnessed during the war, for example between May and June 1917, when he took part in the tenth battle of the Isonzo. Finally, d’Annunzio recalls his first horse, Aquilino, whose death he witnessed when he was a child. At this point, d’Annunzio realized that he must face and acknowledge death in order to make art out of it. We will come back to the relevance of the representation of death in d’Annunzio’s book in the next chapter. As we stated before, all those passages, particularly the one set in France, mirror d’Annunzio’s war experience after 1916.

The sixth sequence of the Third Offering takes place on the day before Easter Sunday. It renews the theme of sensual weakness and the desire to not endure the cure to its end, testing the poet’s devotion one last time. Here d’Annunzio faces an ‘Accessus morbi’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 255; d’Annunzio, 2005a: 368), his moral illness being his sensuality. His senses try to delude him once again by promising him life knowledge, as they did before the war: ‘Again I suffer the attacks and travails of the hereditary illness that so tormented the broken, humiliated Giorgio Aurispa’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 255). Then, d’Annunzio recalls images of ‘shredded flesh’ in the trenches (d’Annunzio, 2011: 257), ²⁰ as an example of the anti-heroic deaths of soldiers lacking in idealist tension. He opposes these images with the description of an air strike on Venice during which he identifies himself with the city heroically facing the attack. Finally, d’Annunzio remembers Eleonora Duse who, as a maternal figure, urges him to stand up again and stop wasting his time, as he did in the past. She urges him not to surrender to the weaknesses of the senses that could make him lose the experience of the war.

The seventh and last sequence is divided into four parts corresponding to the four days between Holy Thursday and Easter Sunday. The intention to compose a diary of the war up to Easter is present since the first redactional phases of the Notturno (Riccardi, 2009); however, only the fragments about Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday date back to 1916, while those on Good Friday and Easter Sunday date from 1921.

On Holy Thursday, d’Annunzio enters the last stage of his medical treatment and outlines for the first time the Easter theme that symbolizes the sacrifice of his eye and his return to life. The daughter is once more cast as a symbol of life and regeneration as she encourages the writer to live again: ‘But that wordless little messenger announced a wondrous, faraway event to me, which I was about to enter like some unexplored region of myself. Memento vivere’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 265). ²¹ Thursday ends with the girl falling asleep on d’Annunzio’s bed, who has been given permission to stand up for a few hours a day. This provides d’Annunzio with a last memory of the past, when little Renata got sick and he took care of her. The memory renews in d’Annunzio the ‘will armed against death’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 269) and the acceptance of his ‘torture’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 270). ²²

Good Friday, the day of the crucifixion, is considerably shorter than the other days and celebrates the martyrdom of the soldiers who re-enact Christ’s sacrifice during the war. Just as the Good Friday liturgy is divided into four parts – the proclamation of the passion, the universal prayer, the adoration of the cross and the communion with Eucharistic bread – so there are four nocturnal fragments: celebrating the passion of the soldier, whose sacrifice is compared to the martyrdom of Christ as in the ‘Calvary [of] the Son of Man’; rendering tribute to the fighting soldiers who ‘bite into eternity’; recalling the dead heroes most dear to d’Annunzio (Miraglia, Bailo, Barbieri and Bresciani, to whom he has erected his own funeral monument: ²³ ‘I have given them a new monument “wherein was never man yet laid”’); and devoting a last thought to the mother’s ‘holy face of love and sorrow […] who takes pity on’ her son (d’Annunzio, 2011: 272–273). ²⁴

Holy Saturday represents a return to life for the poet, who can finally descend to his backyard. On the final day of the Notturno, Easter Sunday, d’Annunzio focuses on the meaning of his patriotic sacrifice, and, remarkably, fears he is broken (d’Annunzio, 2011: 284) and can no longer rise and fight (d’Annunzio, 2011: 281). Therefore, to find a renewed impetus, he returns to the source of his inspiration, to the ultimate meaning of sacrifice: the need for man to transhumanize (d’Annunzio, 2011: 284) and to find in himself ‘a heroic reason for living’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 284). ²⁵

In this final act, d’Annunzio is joined by Oreste Salomone, the survivor of Ljubljana, who, like the poet, is ‘oppressed by the need to surpass himself’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 283). D’Annunzio reveals to Salomone the ultimate beauty of sacrifice undergone far from the battlefield, and he tells him the story we discussed above of the peasant who ‘lets the river of the Fatherland flow over his dark, silent sacrifice’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 286). At the end of the story, d’Annunzio asks Salomone to read the last strip of paper he wrote, which answers the opening question of the book with a new question: ‘But what if there were an even better way to die?’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 287). ²⁶

Through the figure of the peasant d’Annunzio answers this final question. The peasant is the one who takes upon themselves the salvation of their community and who sacrifices themselves in the sublime absolute of an obscure passion. Hence, the humble and unknown death which occurs outside the institutions and the army is, as stated above, the extreme ambition in which d’Annunzio projects his own future after Fiume, and which offers ‘an even better way to die, the opportunity to bring silently, and even secretly […] the offering of life […] to the Nation’ (d’Annunzio, 1976: 349). ²⁷

The Notturno and the representation of the First World War

So far, we have focused on the composition, structure and themes of the book and have shown to what extent the Notturno is a war book that can be considered partly as a real diary and partly as an ideological one. This diary has a double structure: on the one hand, d’Annunzio tells the story of his illness and stresses the value of sacrifice both for those who die in war and those who are mutilated in combat, as the author writes in the last pages of the book:

Aged, bent, broken, blind, with wobbly knees and creaking elbows, here I am, calmly waiting on the banks of my river. […] Heroic inspiration breathes upon the injured, too, breathes upon the human stumps, breathes upon impotent carcasses. […] There is a glory of the heights, and there is a glory of the depths. One can die a good death, and one can die an even better death. (D’Annunzio, 2011: 284–285) ²⁸

On the other hand, behind the story of his illness, behind the visions and memories of the past, lies concealed an ideological diary, that lasts until 1921. From this twofold structure emerge some of the most important topics of national storytelling and institutional First World War propaganda. For instance, the theme of death that has been mainly interpreted as a sort of cupio dissolvi or an intimate quête of the writer should instead be placed within the context of First World War storytelling about death in combat as Isnenghi (1988) did. Isnenghi not only points out that the Notturno deals with the theme of death in combat but he also states that d’Annunzio’s way to talk about war is rather exceptional because the representation of death, especially in a realistic and non-rhetorical manner, is conspicuously absent in First World War narratives, both private and institutional. As Isnenghi notes:

d’Annunzio’s nonconformist work […] is an inexhaustible, crude, and even distressing contemplation his own death and that of his loved ones, death which is given and taken, as the very essence of combat. Against the rationale of the fiction industry and the opportunism of mass cultural policy [d’Annunzio recovers], via his literature, this liminal although often dismissed notion that in war you kill and you get killed. (Isnenghi, 1988: 416–417) ²⁹

A reading such as Isnenghi’s seems to us more correct than the aestheticizing analysis of d’Annunzio’s presumed fascination for death and bloodshed and of his participation in war as an essentially personal experience. The latter reading has been put forward, for example, by Bonadeo, who stresses that ‘the conflict and its aftermath would offer D’Annunzio a wide field of observation and experience in which to exercise his imagination and from which to draw inspiration for his life and work’ (Bonadeo, 1995: 8).

The second element is the theme of mutilation, which in literary and institutional storytelling is censored even more than death. Firstly, those who do not die fighting are of less symbolic worth than those who die. Secondly, these veterans are now socially impaired and physically repellent; in other words, they become a source of shame, a problem for their families, and are therefore marginalized. Their trauma and mutilation are never realistically shown in the public discourse around war. Moreover, as Savettieri shows, when mutilated veterans are represented in propaganda their bodies are intact. Veterans in propaganda gain a symbolic value as they promote the virtue of the soldiers and embody national virility, and as such they are not presented as physically repulsive but rather as sexually attractive (Savettieri, 2017).

In contrast to this tendency, d’Annunzio shows mutilation as much as death, in an equally realistic way, and he does not present the mutilated as inferior to the dead, especially in the Third Offering. Besides this revalorization of the mutilated soldier, d’Annunzio does not emphasize the erotic appeal of the soldiers’ body. Indeed, sensuality and sexuality are perceived as obstacles to the soldiers’ devotion to their country. For this reason, there is no lover or sensual female figure in the Notturno. The only relevant female figures are the mother, who embodies the nation; Eleonora Duse, who, as a protective figure, encourages the fighter; and the daughter, who embodies the trope of the angelic war nurse helping her injured fighter return to life and combat.

The absence of the typical Dannunzian female character is exceptional in his literary production. In the Notturno, the focus lies on the male couple of aviators, who fight and face death side by side. As d’Annunzio says, ‘there is no nobler bond in the world today than this tacit pact that turns two lives and two wings into a single speed, a single prowess, a single death’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 21). ³⁰ Indeed, every Offering is not only devoted to a fellow martyr, as stated above, but also to a male couple: the first and most important being d’Annunzio and Giuseppe Miraglia, in the First Offering. In the Second and Third Offerings, Miraglia’s place is taken respectively by Alfredo Barbieri and Luigi Bresciani.

In this way, d’Annunzio offers his own original interpretation of the theme of male bonding, which is also central to war storytelling. The theme has pre-war origins in d’Annunzio’s works, since it is already central to Maybe Yes, Maybe No (1910), in which d’Annunzio mainly draws on the literary topos of the male couple rooted in the classical and renaissance epic. In this book, the healthy and harmonious relationship of the male couple (represented by two aviators) is opposed to the destructive relationship between man and woman within the heterosexual couple. The female protagonist exerts a disruptive influence on the male protagonist, while the male friendship expresses the need for the male protagonist to liberate himself from the chains of sensuality in order to achieve higher goals. The Notturno takes a further step and completely excludes the negative power of sexuality, as not a single female character challenges male bonds. ³¹

Before Maybe Yes, Maybe No, the disruptive power of the female characters and the need for the male protagonists to distance themselves from them in order to elevate their spirit are already present, for example in the Triumph of Death (1893) and the Maiden of the Rocks (1895). For this reason, as we have already shown in the analysis of the text, d’Annunzio recalls the protagonist of the Triumph of Death Giorgio Aurispa, whose weakness was precisely his inability to relinquish his sensual way of life. In short, the fictional world of d’Annunzio’s Notturno is an exclusively male one, presenting the war as a fully virile experience. This is common in First World War propaganda, where women are typically supposed to support the heroic action of the soldiers and to offer their sons and husbands to their country, as the mother, the daughter and the spiritual mother or mentor (Eleonora Duse) do in the Notturno.

To conclude, by taking part in the Italian war, d’Annunzio pursued one main goal: improve himself and the country. In this process, he depicts himself and a few elected comrades as ideal subjects who are chosen sons of the country and the perfect Italians because they cannot be diverted in their pursuit neither by human weaknesses (above all sensuality) nor by the lack of commitment of the government itself. They are so superior and devoted that they can serve the cause even when defeated, mutilated and left alone. In other words, by telling of his participation in the Italian war, d’Annunzio represents himself and his closest fellow men as superior national leaders who have been regenerated by war and who form a model for the national character. This is the ideological bottom line of the book, but it is not a new topic either in First World War storytelling or in d’Annunzio’s works. Indeed, the idea of regeneration in war was widespread all over Europe especially on the eve of the First World War. Also – and this is crucial for this article – the myth of the regeneration of the Italians, the idea that a reforming of the Italian character is needed, is a topic with which d’Annunzio was very familiar since it forms one of his strongest leitmotivs that he inherited from the 19th century.

The Notturno and its non-political reception

We start by assessing that the content of the Notturno has not been fully studied from a political point of view since, as Lewis puts it, ‘surprisingly few critics have considered the Notturno in relation to d’Annunzio’s political activities’ (Lewis, 2000: 184). This is strange, given that the book was published at the end of the period which scholars identify as the main political phase in d’Annunzio’s life, and given that the main question of the book is ‘what does it mean to be an Italian soldier and how can I devote myself to my country?’. For instance, just to mention some recent studies: Peterson (2014) affirms that the Notturno marks d’Annunzio’s return to artistic life; and Zeppi (1999) states that d’Annunzio’s literary production, beginning with the Notturno, is alien to the political sphere. Lewis’s political reading of the Notturno forms an exception; however, he says that the book is ‘far from being a political manifesto’ (Lewis, 2000: 183), he limits the political value of the text to the last part of d’Annunzio’s political action and he studies the book as ‘a crucial text in the history of Fascist mythology’ (Lewis, 2000: 183).

Scholars who stated that the Notturno does not belong to d’Annunzio’s political writings, have stressed its sense of intimate withdrawal and introspection. Those who attempted a political analysis of the book mainly interpreted it as an expression of d’Annunzio’s proximity to the Fascist movement, which took power a few months after its publication, and endorsed a reductionist (proto-fascist) interpretation of d’Annunzio’s left-wing ideology. It is unquestionable that Fascism contains aspects of d’Annunzio’s poetics (which we touched upon above): the relation between the masses and the leader, the theme of patriotic sacrifice, male dominance and so on. Nevertheless, one must read the book not only with an eye towards the future, but also with an understanding of the past, namely of the political discourse that d’Annunzio inherited from the 19th century. In general, the last period of d’Annunzio’s life was branded by the Fascist regime. However, if the Dannunzian component of Fascism is undeniable, the fascistic nature of d’Annunzio’s ideology before 1921 is highly questionable. ³² The only part of the Notturno that has been read in political terms is the Post Scriptum, the paratext symbolically dated ‘November 4, 1921’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 306) that has been correctly interpreted as the ideological testament of the Commander of the failed Fiume Exploit and has also been linked to d’Annunzio’s connection with the Italian extreme right at the dawn of the Fascist period. However, d’Annunzio’s ideological education far precedes the advent of Fascism. Fascism does not affect d’Annunzio’s political stance, but the Fascist reception of d’Annunzio affects the reception of his ideology. ³³

This reception becomes even more prejudicial after the Second World War. According to Alatri, after the fall of Fascism d’Annunzio is considered as an iconic figure of the Ventennio and as the ‘greatest representative of an ideology and a literary style by which the national spirit and literary criticism was clearly repulsed’ (Alatri, 1992: 20). ³⁴ For this reason, the assessment of the political component of d’Annunzio’s writings mainly focuses on his later activities and in particular on the period of the Fiume Exploit, its relation to Fascism and the fact that d’Annunzio gives voice to the post-First World War cultural climate of rebellion against liberalism and against the establishment (Alatri, 1980). Such a focus overlooks the ideological premises which d’Annunzio shares not with Fascism itself but with the first ideologists of Fascism, who, as well as d’Annunzio, are to a certain extent heirs of the Risorgimento and of its storytelling after Unification.

The reception of d’Annunzio’s political commitment

The aforementioned reception of the Notturno is also related to another commonplace in the reception of d’Annunzio’s political commitment, namely the widespread inclination to downplay his political project or to limit its extension in time. ³⁵ We now discuss this critical commonplace, since we believe it is an essential step in reaching a better understanding of the Notturno’s ideological-political roots.

Readers, media and even scholars, despite seminal studies that argue the opposite (see infra), see d’Annunzio only in terms of his role as the most influential and spectacular figure of Italian aestheticism, who simply used the war to add a new dimension to his aestheticism. ³⁶ From this perspective, there is no consistent political stance in his poetics, his politics is a late and incidental dimension of aestheticism and his participation in the war is not an ethical experience but an aesthetic one, in which he yearns to find a beautiful death (Piredda, 2015: 69). The idea that d’Annunzio lacks political depth has authoritative advocates and dates back to the analysis of his contemporaries. For example, we can recall Gramsci who, in his Prison Notebooks, negates the existence of real political concepts in d’Annunzio, although he acknowledges his contribution in the popularization of the concept of the nation. Gramsci stresses the predominance of emotions in d’Annunzio’s political speeches and writings, which is precisely what determines his popularity, since d’Annunzio’s substantially apolitical discourse appeals to the lower middle class in particular, a group which cultivates an apolitical admiration for charismatic leaders (Gramsci, 1975).

On the opposite side of the critical spectrum, scholars who acknowledge d’Annunzio’s political contents still debate the consistency and extension of his political thoughts and activities. Renzo De Felice (1978) states that it was not possible to identify a real political stance in d’Annunzio before 1918. The majority of the essays presented in 1985 at the conference D’Annunzio politico align themselves with De Felice’s position. Later, Emilio Papa claims that d’Annunzio’s political life can be divided into five periods, the first being his very limited and not relevant career as a congressman (1897–1900), followed by the interventionist period, his participation in the war, the Fiume Exploit and the Fascist period (Papa, 1999). More recently, Trinchese (2009) reassesses the limited extension of d’Annunzio’s political life and limits it to the years of war and the months in Fiume.

Other scholars claim that a political consciousness is present before the war but is not always traceable. To this trend belong the studies of Becker (1994) and Borelli (2017) who say that the publication of The Maiden of the Rocks (1895) marks a first turn from d’Annunzio’s decadent and non-committed poetics to militant nationalism. Zeppi (1999) states that the origins of d’Annunzio’s political consciousness date back to 1879 when he wrote the Ode to Umberto di Savoia, followed by For the Italians Dead in Africa in 1887 (see also Gaillard, 1995). According to Zeppi, however, two souls coexist in d’Annunzio’s writings: a political one, represented by texts such as The Italian Fleet (1888), the Naval Odes (1893), Electra (1903) and Merope (1911), and a sensual one that inspires texts such as The Child of Pleasure (1889) and Paradisiac Poem (1893).

In sharp opposition to these critical stances, other scholars, such as Alatri, have stressed that all of d’Annunzio’s writings express a political ideology. As Alatri incontestably shows in 1980, d’Annunzio’s works are political by nature to such an extent that all his prose and poetry can be seen to display clear political stances (Alatri, 1980). Along with Alatri, Biondi stresses the strong interconnection between implicit and explicit politics in d’Annunzio’s whole corpus. According to Biondi, all of d’Annunzio’s writing is political, or at least politically and ideologically oriented, since his political viewpoint reverberates even in writings that are not explicitly political (Biondi, 1989). We agree with Alatri and Biondi, as d’Annunzio undoubtedly would have done as well. Indeed, in the Notturno he proclaims the ‘thirty years of constancy’ of his love for Italy, which means the 30 years of his political commitment to the nation, that is from the late 1880s (d’Annunzio, 2011: 72). In fact, scholars such as Di Mauro-Jackson (2017), for example, have analysed d’Annunzio’s political ‘gaze’ from its very first novel, The Child of Pleasure (1889).

D’Annunzio and the fourth Risorgimento war

In what follows, we discuss the Notturno in the context of the political debate on national identity in late 19th- and early 20th-century Italy. Since the Risorgimento, Italian historiography has politicized and functionalized the notion of a national past to serve political goals. This tendency is also present in all the works of d’Annunzio, whose national storytelling stresses the persistence of Italian greatness throughout the centuries and emphasizes the accomplishments, among others, of Italian artists, writers and commanders.

At the dawn of the First World War, d’Annunzio interprets the war as a chance to re-establish Italian greatness and to reinvigorate what he sees as the glorious ideals of the Risorgimento, rooted in a nationalist interpretation of the Italian past. According to d’Annunzio and many others, those ideals were betrayed by post-Unitarian Italian governments. Before the First World War, therefore, d’Annunzio was one of the most famous writers to blame the government for its mediocrity and lack of ambition:

The national conscience, which had sprung up in the fire of the great revolution, in which all differences seemed as if they fused like different metals in one furnace, as little by little, through bad systems of government, has gone on growing weaker and weaker; and today it seems almost entirely to have gone astray. (D’Annunzio, 2003: 547–548) ³⁷

This position evolves from d’Annunzio’s endorsement of the government’s colonial expansionism in 1911. ³⁸ After this, in 1914 d’Annunzio supported Salandra’s second government and, in 1915, the interventionists’ movement. Throughout the war he was an inexhaustible advocate for institutional propaganda. This support ended after the First World War, because of his disappointment in the outcome of the Treaties of Versailles (1919), Rapallo (1920) and Berlin (1921), as we have shown in our reading of the Notturno.

From 1914 to 1918, d’Annunzio viewed the war as an exceptional opportunity to fashion a better Italian man as part of a political project which was being carried out on a national level by the government. As he says in the Notturno, he saw the war as the ‘forge in which the new substance was being smelted’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 92). ³⁹ This new Italian, because of his heroic vitalism, is dramatically different to the post-Unitarian man – domesticated by a short-sighted policy – and embodies the core values of the Italian man of the past. According to d’Annunzio, the ‘newest Italy’ must renew ‘the virtues of native genius consecrated by tradition’ to become the nation of those who ‘fight to be worthy of adding a harmonious stone to the building erected by their fathers’ (d’Annunzio, 2005b: 2212). ⁴⁰ For this reason, the Italian soldier is consistently represented as both an innovative and a conservative force that renews national greatness. In the Notturno, the interventionist crowd is described as an evolving mass that tries to assume a new form in order to respond to the ‘voice of the country’, which calls ‘from the depths of dead centuries [… as well as] from the depths of centuries to come’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 75).

The idea of a continuity between past and future, the metaphor of the native genius that lives across centuries, recurs frequently between 1914 and 1921 in d’Annunzio’s private and public writings, but it has an earlier origin. For example, when in the Notturno d’Annunzio talks about Italians who are ‘borne up by the twentieth – ten and ten – by the second decuman surge’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 75), ⁴¹ he recalls a passage from the Oration for the Sagra of the Mille (5 May 1860 – 5 May 1915) of 1915 which, in turn, re-elaborates The Celestial and Terrestrial Commandments of the Nation in the Cult of Expectation that dates back to 1900. Moreover, d’Annunzio professes his faith in the ‘third life of Italy’, which he imagines as ‘a nation which not only with its own new forces but with the faith and will of all the past centuries […] rises into an unknown future’ (d’Annunzio, 2005a: 425). ⁴² In this way, d’Annunzio underlines the continuity between his positions and the ideals of the Risorgimento.

D’Annunzio and the civil role of the poet

Another key facet of d’Annunzio’s reflection on national identity is the role that he assigns to the poet in the cultural and political debate on the nation, a role that was established in the Risorgimento, when poets were credited with civil primacy. Indeed, d’Annunzio’s reflections on the leadership of the poet align with the Risorgimento idea of the poet who expresses the national spirit, inspires the nation and guides it. This stance on the poet as the voice, the pedagogue and the guide of the nation is particularly strong in 19th-century Italy because, during the unification process, literature shaped a particularly cohesive and consistent national storytelling. This is in contrast to the political debate, which was fragmented into different and sometimes contradictory positions and programmes. For this reason, the poet’s voice is stronger than that of the politician and has a long-term impact on collective storytelling and the construction of the national identity (Sabatini, 2013: 18).

D’Annunzio ascribes a particular aim to the poet; namely, to preach and establish the superiority of the Italian race. The credo of the Italian poet of Unified Italy is the ‘cult of expectation’ (d’Annunzio, 2011: 121), ⁴³ which is the preparation of the nation (of the Italians of the future) for future supremacy. This cult revives faith in the third life of Italy, after the delusion of post-Unification. Until 1914, the cult of expectation aimed to shape the historical and civil consciousness of Italians, and it recurs frequently in d’Annunzio’s literary works as well as in his political speeches; for example in the Italic Example of the Victorious Genius Shown to the Youth of Italy, from 1901: ‘You are, oh Young People, Italy’s imminent spring. My faith, my constancy, my expectation, make me worthy of being the announcer of your victorious will’ (d’Annunzio, 2005a: 452). ⁴⁴ Those same words return in the Notturno, when d’Annunzio recalls his interventionist speeches, and when he reflects on the meaning of heroism and courage in battle and stresses his long-lasting commitment to the nation:

Danger has a lyrical effect on me. My poetry is sustained by my courage, not only in war but also – if I consider the great moments of my prior life – in peace, as in earlier times, during the cult of expectation, when I fashioned my wings and my arms’. (D’Annunzio, 2011: 121) ⁴⁵

Indeed, after 1914 the war offered d’Annunzio the opportunity to finally fulfil his expectations, shape history, give birth to the new Italian man and reverse the downward spiral represented by post-Unitarian Italy. Moreover, from the point of view of those who were disappointed by the first decades of the Savoy monarchy, the First World War represented the epic foundational war that was not fought in 19th-century Italy. The idea of a ‘decisive war’ standing as a turning point in the history of a nation, as a moment in which the spirit of a nation takes control of its destiny, grows and spreads across Europe in the 19th century (Creasy, 1851). According to many Italian and foreign observers of the period, Italy had no decisive heroic battle during the Risorgimento. For this reason, the First World War, as the act of collective and ultimate devotion to the country, was viewed as a chance for redeeming the country’s original sin: it would compensate for the lack of a ‘decisive war’ and any mass participation during the process of unification. Indeed, if we look at the literary representation of the Risorgimento, military facts are hardly prominent, and even the capture of Rome is perceived as a minor and diplomatic rather than heroic episode (Ferroni, 2011: 380–381).

More than this, what the Italy of post-1861 seemed to be missing was a heroic model that could speak to the present, inspire the masses and lead the country after Unification. Both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, which for the first time had to assume leadership of an independent state, needed to project themselves through a narrative that could address their new functions. Moreover, they needed to identify themselves through a new national rhetoric which was as strong as that of the Risorgimento but also showed the international ambitions of the country.

Before the First World War, d’Annunzio had already responded to this need with The Child of Pleasure (1889), where, on the one hand, he fashioned a renewed aristocratic model for the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie of the new nation, a model rooted in the national past which showed strong continuity with the ideals of the Risorgimento and expressed a particular pride for the Italian race. On the other hand, this model is cosmopolitan since it integrates the newest trends of European Decadentism. Decadent poses are embedded in the notion of the greatness of Italian history, shaping an understanding of Italian leadership as fascinating as other European examples. Indeed, as Isnenghi puts it, Italy ‘crawls with aspiring Andrea Sperelli’ looking for ‘models of emancipation’, against the backdrop of a society which was evolving and where ‘Salandra’s old right and the new right, with its expansionist, colonial and belligerent nationalism, offered new possibilities in a renewed public sphere’ (Isnenghi, 2008: 351–352). ⁴⁶

At the dawn of the new century, d’Annunzio replaced his first aristocratic model with the model of the man of action, the Italian leader, either aristocratic or of the upper middle class, who is superior for the mere fact of being Italian and belonging to the greatest culture of Europe. This further aspect of d’Annunzio’s model was even more influential than the previous one because it was more inclusive, particularly in The Flame (1900) and in Maybe Yes, Maybe No (1910). The new model was less aristocratic in the sense that it was no longer in conflictual opposition to the masses. Instead, the masses were integrated into d’Annunzio’s national storytelling, as the figure of the exceptional Italian becomes their guide. ⁴⁷ This transformation begins in The Flame and evolves throughout d’Annunzio’s civil speeches in the first decade of the 19th century, culminating in the Notturno, where d’Annunzio represents himself as a guide for the masses – in the pages devoted to the interventionist campaign – and as a brother to the soldiers, especially the infantry. Hence, from this point, the education of leaders is flanked by the education of the masses, a task which the poet assumes to teach them how to think, feel and act as true Italians.

In sum, if in the Risorgimento the ideals of the nation flourished mainly among a limited group of educated individuals, after unification d’Annunzio developed a national storytelling for the aristocratic and bourgeois leaders, which he later expanded to include mass nationalism. This storytelling accomplishes in the end the nationalization of the lower classes, which was the key to mass mobilization.

D’Annunzio between the Risorgimento and the Renaissance

D’Annunzio is certainly not the only writer to develop a national storytelling, but his contribution to collective Italian identity is original because it is not limited to the elements sketched above. Indeed, his originality stems from the extension of the national past he recovers to shape, complete and, most importantly, popularize the myth of the Italian race.

In particular, d’Annunzio’s stance is innovative because it recovers figures, artists, works and events of the Renaissance that were disregarded by the mainstream thinkers of the Risorgimento and the fin de siècle. He embeds the Renaissance as a whole, along with its entire cultural heritage, as a positive force into the debate on national identity. As such, he contrasts with De Sanctis’ reception of the Renaissance, unquestionably one of the most influential intellectuals (if not the most influential) who fashioned the historiography of Italian literature from the Early Modern period to the 19th century in light of the ideals of Unification. In his History of Italian Literature, De Sanctis interprets Italian literary history from the point of view of the historical and political debate of the 19th century, and censures those periods and figures that do not match the needs of this national cause. For this reason, he stigmatizes most of the Renaissance artists, with few exceptions, since he sees the 16th century as the beginning of Italian international and political humiliation.

De Sanctis states that ‘the Italian race is not yet healed [from] the moral weakness […] [of the] fatal man [who] impedes our path if we do not have the strength to kill him in our consciousness’ (De Sanctis, 1869: 235). The fatal man that must be killed is the Renaissance man, who, for De Sanctis, embodies a moral void and an indolence towards the national cause. De Sanctis sees in the Renaissance the degradation of the Italian cultural flourishing that started in the late Middle Ages with the father of Italian literature, Dante. As such, the Renaissance is viewed as the beginning of Italian decadence, against which the intellectuals and the heroes of the Risorgimento fought. According to De Sanctis, the first symptoms of this decadence are already manifested in the works of Petrarch, whose attention is fixed on the cult of the formal aspects of literature and shows no ethical or civic commitment (Rubini, 2014: 75–84). Dante’s primacy implies the depreciation of authors who, following in the footsteps of Petrarch, represent the non-committed writers of the Renaissance, a time in which tyranny, aristocracy and the clergy prevailed (Quondam, 2004: 62). ⁴⁸ De Sanctis’ stance is attuned to the rediscovery of Dante as a political figure and as the first Vate of Italian identity, typical of the 19th century (Conti, 2012). In contrast to this mainstream position, d’Annunzio fashions a counter-canon that aims to inspire Italians to be proud of their entire history. For example, in the Oration for the Death of Giosuè Carducci (1907), where d’Annunzio presents himself as the successor of Carducci’s civil poetry, he explicitly states that:

Whoever showed that he [Carducci] understood the idea toward which our lineage is led by his genius through secular events? […] He said: ‘We need above all to assert ourselves strongly and gloriously as a nation. Italian civilization has no gaps and does not want barbaric cuts or tears. We establish and restore ancient and new life, throwing away tedium and purging the leprosy of dark times and servile contacts’. (D’Annunzio, 2005b: 2288–2289) ⁴⁹

If mainstream national historiography identifies a fracture between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, d’Annunzio claims the opposite, since, as he states, the virtues of Italians remain unaffected by the change of the political situation, even in Petrarch and during the Renaissance. The Dantean model persists in the Renaissance, through Michelangelo Buonarroti, Benvenuto Cellini, Bartolomeo Colleoni, Francesco Colonna, Tomaso Contarini, Caterina Cornaro, Melozzo da Forlì, Giovanni da Pistoia, Jacopo Della Quercia, Luca Della Robbia, Giulio II della Rovere, Andrea Del Verrocchio, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Vincenzo Galilei, Pisanello, Ramondo Mannelli, Francesco Raibolini, Leonardo Strozzi, Jacopo Tintoretto, Tiziano and Giorgio Vasari. These are all names that are mentioned in the Notturno, along with Dante, as proof of the constancy of Italian greatness.

The model represented by these figures is eventually contrasted with the poor ambitions of the post-Unitarian Italian government, offering an objective to aim for during the years of the expectation. Vitalism, constancy in pursuing great ideals and goals, a will to overcome limits, a heroic attitude, pride for the Italian past and the cult of the Italian race are the most important traits of this model which during the war was finally embodied and revitalized by the Italian soldiers.

In the Notturno, in the wake of this depiction of the ideal Italian man, Dante is not recalled as the civic poet of the nation, as he is usually depicted in the Risorgimento. In the Notturno, as well as in other Dannunzian contemporary texts, Dante, like Michelangelo during the period of the Sistine Chapel, is the figure that inspires others to overcome their human limitations. He is the poet Ulysses, who incites to pursue higher goals, as in Inferno XXIV–XXVI, the most quoted cantos in the Notturno. The idea behind the image of the poet Ulysses is that of the Italian artist as a Ulyssean figure, a homo faber who overcomes obstacles in order to give expression to the greatness of Italian genius. The greatness of the homo faber is especially manifest when he faces death for pursuing his goals. This concept, which d’Annunzio inherits from Romanticism, occurs throughout his writings but is especially present in the years between 1915 and 1921, when it is used to imply that the very same creative power of the Italian historical homo faber is the same force that now moves the Italian soldiers, who forge a new man in the national war:

The days of Santa Gorizia turned all anguish and impatience into resolute desperation. I learned then the meaning of Michelangelo’s words: ‘Not a thought is born in me that does not have death sculpted within it’.

The only way I managed to regain control of myself was by resolving that I would overcome all obstacles to win back the wings that belonged to my will. (D’Annunzio, 2011: 291) ⁵⁰

Hence, just as artists reflect themselves in the potency of their masterpieces, the might of the Italian soldiers is reflected in the Italian war. Moreover, d’Annunzio’s fashioning of the ideal Italian man also has specific value in the restoration of national reputation in the eyes of other European countries. The widespread denigration of the Italians, who, in the European context, were depicted for almost two centuries as morally, physically and psychologically inferior (Patriarca, 2013), impacted the national self-fashioning of the Risorgimento. We can see this in the statements of Francesco De Sanctis, Cesare Balbo and Giuseppe Mazzini among others, who foregrounded a sense of shame when comparing themselves with other Europeans.

This produces the long-lasting topos of self-deprecating Italian rhetoric, and the notion that Italians need to be educated and improved: d’Annunzio adheres to the idea that an education is needed and, as the basis of this education, that Italians need to acknowledge the positive values of their history. Hence, d’Annunzio’s cult of expectation corresponds to a general tendency and, as we stated above, cooperates both in the process of the emancipation of the leading classes and in the popularization of a nationalist narrative amongst the lower classes.

Yet, what he offers to the nation is a much more inclusive interpretation of the past, in which no period is left aside, since the very fact of deprecating a specific period of the national past implies that there can be vices in the Italian character and that the greatness of the Italian race can be undermined. Therefore, the nation that d’Annunzio pictures in his Notturno is a nation that is heir to the Risorgimento, Dante and Michelangelo and that can finally express their devotion to their country’s cause in a war in which their heroism is no longer an expectation but becomes historic action.