Life as a work of art

Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) was the absolute protagonist of the Italian cultural panorama at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries . An artist capable of arousing great acclaim or radical antipathies, he knew how to be talked about like no other in Italy, so as to feed the myth of a life lived, and offered to the public, as a work of art.

D'Annunzio, in fact, in an Italy that was opening up to modernity – among industries, cities revolutionized in a few years by electricity, trams, illuminated signs – was the first in our country to discover mass culture and to interpret it .

The writer first of all transformed the reader-consumers of worldly periodicals, to which he collaborated for many years as a journalist, into the readers of his own books. So he made every moment and aspect of his life the subject of public attention. For this reason, his sentimental adventures, his political positions, his military exploits, even his clothing, formed a whole with his work, and were the constant object of attention from the newspapers. In short, more than a century ago D'Annunzio was a real star, whom young people tried in every way to imitate even if his life was basically inimitable as " D'Annunzio " testifies (Rizzoli, 2023, pp. 300 , also e-book), the biography that Giordano Bruno Guerri dedicated to the Poet of Italy at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Guerri, president of the “Il Vittoriale degli Italiani” Foundation, focuses in his book on the most intense and creative years of D'Annunzio's life. This is how D'Annunzio tells us a young rebel student, poet, novelist. D'Annunzio libertine, lover, husband and father. D'Annunzio soldier, warrior, revolutionary. D'Annunzio politician, adventurer, influencer ante litteram in Italy more than a century ago.

The result is a compelling and unusual tale of the poet's existence , in which Guerri - through an apparatus of unpublished images, autographs, memorabilia - manages to outline with precision a sentimental portrait that conquers and convinces. Sentimental portrait because, to use the words of Giordano Bruno Guerri himself, the author here takes on the role of the Vate's "widow" : «Technically they are, like wives who – after their writer husbands have died – strive to keep their memory alive and works. But if widows are usually sad, I'm a happy widow, I also have other passions. And then, now that I know him well, I can joke with him, play with him, not fall into the traps he has scattered throughout his life to mislead contemporaries and posterity, enjoying them». And at the same time attempting, to use Guerri's words again, «in the enterprise of freeing d'Annunzio from prejudices that seemed ineradicable».

In our opinion, the book demonstrates that the feat is accomplished.