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.