Ringvereine

If a writer invented Gabriele D'Annunzio for a novel, their editor would send him back. Too much, they'd say. And yet there he was: Italy's most celebrated poet and its most scandalous celebrity, a bald, one-eyed dandy in his mid-fifties who had spent the war becoming a genuine hero: leading a motor-boat raid into an Austrian harbour and flying over Vienna to bomb the city with propaganda leaflets. He had debts like a government, more lovers than a fleet of sailors, and an unshakeable conviction that he was the destiny of the Italian nation. In September 1919, he decided to prove it by stealing a city.

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Jason Collings
August 2026