Is Gabriele D'Annunzio, controversial poet and evangelist of war, ripe for rehabilitation yet? Lucy Hughes-Hallett, a British biographer and critic, in a deeply evocative new biography, suggests probably not. There is too much blood on his hands both from the first world war and from the 15 bizarre months in 1919-20 when he was the charismatic duce of a rogue state in the Adriatic port of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia). His treatment of women, his exhausting "maximalism" as a poet, his astonishing vanity and his chilling nationalism do not fit him well for a place among the heroes of the birth of the modern era.
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