Italy’s first Duce

There is something to be said for a bald-headed gnome with the power, according to his biographer, to seduce any woman he wanted, including the most celebrated and desirable actress of the day, despite being handicapped by red-rimmed eyes, bad breath and crooked teeth ‘of three colours, white, yellow and black’. And something more deserves to be said about the seducer’s rabble-rousing demagoguery that allowed him to pave the way for fascism, and for the nationalist hatred of democracy that blighted Europe after the first world war. But whether those deserts really require 200,000 words is another matter.

The gnome was Gabriele d’Annunzio, who stumbled into the footnotes of history when he seized the Yugoslav city of Rijeka, or Fiume, in 1919 on behalf of Italy. He was by then the most famous literary figure in the country — ‘the greatest Italian poet since Dante’, Lucy Hughes-Hallett suggests, as well as a dramatist whose incendiary play provoked a riot, and a novelist admired by James Joyce.

He was also an inveterate note-taker, absorbed by the detail of his own life which he recorded in lengthy, self-congratulatory style. For a biographer, such personal material is dusted with gold, but is liable to lure the best of writers into its maze of self-justifying significance.

To tackle her flamboyantly narcissistic subject, Hughes-Hallett decided to abandon chronology in favour of a mosaic of information presented in foxtrot tempo so that the slow development of characters or conversations alternates with the quick collapse of whole years into a few paragraphs.

For almost 300 pages, this idiosyncratic structure works astonishingly well. The high spots of D’Annunzio’s fascinating yet repellent career appear in a kaleidoscope that places his birth in the Abruzzi capital of Pescara long after the first steps of his rapid climb to fame as journalist and poet in the 1880s, and the flying accident that blinded him in one eye during the first world war comes before his famous affair in the 1890s with the actress, Eleanora Duse — the Elizabeth Taylor of her time — that established D’Annunzio as Italy’s top celebrity stud.