D’Annunzio in Fiume

Guest post: Federico Campagna

Fig. 1: Gabriele D’Annunzio with legionaries in Fiume, 1919. Public domain.

The following excerpt is taken from the Italian philosopher and writer Federico Campagna’s latest book, Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons On Escaping History (Bloomsbury 2025), shared here with the kind permission of the author and publisher. The book is a treasure-trove of provocative histories of the Mediterranean that present the imagination as a powerful and inspiring political force. The excerpt is drawn from the book’s fifth chapter, ‘Traitors: Modernity’, which is terrifically wide-ranging in its selection of examples. They include Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca’s treasonous ‘betrayal’ of Spain’s colonial enterprise in the Americas in the sixteenth century, and the story of a Ukranian slave, Roxelana, who worked her way up through Ottoman society to become one of the most significant and influential women in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Another example considered in the chapter are the fascinating origins of the short-lived Free State of Fiume, which was grounded in the intervention of a military general and the best-known writer associated with decadent literature in Italy, Gabriele D’Annunzio. As Campagna sets out, what emerged from D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume was an exceptionally complex interstice in the political climate of a Europe ravaged by war, one that positioned equality, liberty and aesthetic experimentation at the heart of its constitutional and cultural foundations.

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28 June 1914: a Bosnian Serb nationalist assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne of Austria-Hungary. A few months later, war ravages Europe and its neighbouring countries, including the Ottoman Empire.

[…]

By 1918, nothing remained of the old political structures of the syncretic Mediterranean. Brightly coloured and freshly starched, new flags soared over the ashes of the multi-ethnic empires of Ottoman and Habsburg. Loud like a trumpet, the spirit of the age called for anyone lingering in an opaque area of mixing to declare themselves in unequivocal terms. Everyone had to align with the character and destiny of their assigned category: the Greeks with the Greeks, the Turks with the Turks, the Jews with the Jews and so on. Just as the globe had been sliced by the grids of modern cartography, so the living, too, had to conform themselves to the logic of a world that was being reorganized like a natural history museum or a commercial warehouse.

[…]

[S]earching for a way out of the inevitable, the Mediterranean imagination resorted to a solution that appeared absurd, if not impossible. It responded to the merciless precision of the age by mixing all political positions and identities. It defied the new military and industrial complex by reviving the spirit of past pirate adventures. It presented poetry and art as a community’s strongest weapons, and the pursuit of beauty and pleasure as the true aim of social life. And it chose the most ravaged land, the coast of the Balkans, as the stage where an entire world would enact its own funeral in the guise of a wild party.

The year was 1919. Peace had returned almost everywhere, except for the war still raging between the Greeks and the Turks.

The victorious powers of Western Europe rested contented with their gains. Among the victors, only the Italians, whose ranking among the world’s powers was entirely self-assigned, felt that their war efforts had not been adequately repaid by the terms of the armistice. Confronted with the tragedy of half a million dead soldiers, and as many permanently disabled, the Italian populace turned its discontent into a nationalistic lament: until all the ‘Italian’ territories had been liberated and reunited with the motherland, every drop of blood would have been spilt in vain. The most blatant example of this ‘injustice’ was right on Italy’s doorstep: the majority-Italian port town of Fiume, previously part of the Habsburg Empire, was about to be assigned to the newly founded kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Thus, it started in the Balkans, on the long wave of Italian nationalism. Yet, in just a few weeks, it became something else entirely: a pan-Mediterranean project aimed at establishing life on new foundations – poetic, revolutionary, contradictory, and, ultimately, impossible.

It was the beginning of the strange and short adventure of the Free State of Fiume.

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‘Fiume is the fifth season of the world.’[1] Rarely has a rogue state been described in such poetic terms. But at Fiume, poetry was the general common denominator. At the head of the expedition that had taken over the town in September 1919, there was none other than the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.

In fact, D’Annunzio was more than a poet: an acclaimed novelist and playwright, he was also a decorated war hero many times over, an aviator, a transgressive performer, a fashion innovator, a pioneering advertiser, an egomaniac and an avid consumer of cocaine. His seemingly inexhaustible creativity had made him an international celebrity, and his inventions had taken hold of the Italian imagination. In later years, when the Fascist Party seized power in Italy, the regime would appropriate elements of his aesthetics, casting an enduring shadow on his legacy. However, as we shall see, D’Annunzio himself was not reducible to fascism.

Fig. 2: Gabriele D’Annunzio reading, 1908. Public domain.

When he led the first detachment of deserters from the Italian army into the town of Fiume, D’Annunzio was aware of entering a dangerous game. Although he declared himself to be interpreting the patriotic wish of Fiume’s Italian population, he knew very well that he was weakening Italy’s position at the post-war negotiating table. The Italian government, furious at D’Annunzio’s stunt, ordered the army to surround the town. Fiume was isolated, cut off from the railway system and from access to food and supplies. By itself, the town had only days before it would have to surrender. Its survival depended entirely on D’Annunzio’s ability to free up the popular imagination. With a stream of communiques, he made clear that what was at stake was much more than a small territorial annexation. He and his deserters were part of a global movement fighting the abuses of the powerful nations over the weaker ones.

[…]

Rejected by the Italian government, Fiume called to itself all the rebels against capitalism and Anglo-American imperialism: the then nascent fascists, but also the syndicalists, the anarchists and the communists. ‘I stand for communism without dictatorship. No wonder, considering that my entire culture is anarchic. It is my intention to make this city a spiritual island from which an eminently communist action can radiate towards all oppressed nations’.[2] The anarcho-communism of Fiume, however, had little in common with the harshness of ‘Lenin’s doctrine, which has lost its way in blood. Here the Bolshevik thistle turns into a rose of love’.[3] It was a form of ‘Latinised Bolshevism’[4] that combined the cult of action, a genuine attention to the plight of the oppressed and to the demands of the workers, with a decadent aesthetic and the ambition of bringing about a spiritual revolution through art. All this, within a hopelessly besieged town and through the efforts of the international brigade of deserters, rebels, criminals and artists who had responded to a poet’s call.

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Fig. 3: Gabriele D'Annunzio in Fiume, 30 May 1920. Public domain.

Speaking from the balcony of the palace of government to a frenzied crowd shouting his war cry ‘Eia eia alala!’ – a spectacle and a motto that would later be appropriated by the fascists – D’Annunzio announced the launch of a new constitution, La Carta del Carnaro. It was the most visionary constitutional text of its time. It established a republic based on socialist principles, ruled through a democratic system, and geared towards a spiritual revolution fuelled by art and poetry. The literary style of the charter was D’Annunzio’s, but its contents were mainly the work of the revolutionary syndicalist Alceste de Ambris. It is worth pausing for a moment to browse through its articles, starting with those guaranteeing equality for all citizens:

Article 4 – [The State] recognizes and confirms the sovereignty of all citizens without distinction of sex, lineage, language, class, or religion.

12 – All citizens of both sexes have full authority to choose and engage in all industries, professions, arts, and crafts.

16 – Citizens are endowed with all civil and political rights upon reaching the age of twenty. Without distinction of sex, they become legitimate voters and eligible for all offices.

The constitution protected minorities, whether religious or ethnic:

7 – The fundamental freedoms of thought, press, assembly, and association are guaranteed to all citizens. Every religious worship is admitted, respected, and can build its own temple.

[…]

Equality was guaranteed by institutions that were set to safeguard and nurture the individual:

8 – The statutes guarantee to all citizens of both sexes: education in clear and healthy schools; remunerated work with a minimum wage sufficient for a decent living; assistance in sickness, disability, and involuntary unemployment; retirement pension for old age; inviolability of the home; habeas corpus; compensation for damages in case of judicial error or abused power.

To avoid exploitation, the institution of private property was limited to its honest acquisition through labour:

[…]

9 – The State does not recognize ownership as the absolute dominion of the person over the thing but considers it as the most useful social function. The only legitimate title of ownership over any means of production and exchange is labour.

Although workers were at the centre of the constitution, work itself was not idolized. As in Marx, the ultimate aim of the economic system was the abolition of work:

19 – [Out of the ten guilds that reunite the workers of Fiume,] the tenth guild has neither profession nor count nor name […]. It is represented, in the civic sanctuary, by a burning lamp inscribed with an . . . allusion to a spiritualized form of human labour: ‘Labour without labour’.

These political and economic provisions, however, were only means to a higher end. Fiume’s revolution had to bring about a transformation of the spirit. Just as Oscar Wilde supported revolutionary socialism because, by liberating people from need, it elevated them to the appreciation of beauty, so D’Annunzio saw the transformation of life into art as the ultimate revolutionary objective. Beauty and culture were to be pursued in every field:

50 – For every people, culture is the brightest of long weapons. . . . For the people of Fiume, it becomes the most effective tool of health and fortune against external threats. . . . Therefore, [Fiume] places at the top of its laws the culture of its people.

63 – A college of Edili is established […]. [I]t aims to restore to the people the love of beautiful lines and beautiful colours in the things that serve everyday life; it encourages entrepreneurs and builders to understand how new materials – iron, glass, concrete – demand only to be raised to a harmonious life towards the invention of a new architecture.

64 – In [Fiume], Music is a religious and social institution […]. If every rebirth of a noble people is a lyrical effort, if every creative feeling is a lyrical power, if every new order is a lyrical order, then Music, considered as a ritual language, is the exalter of the act of life, of the work of life.

Fiume’s revolution was ultimately summarized by D’Annunzio as a religious effort towards a kind of ‘progress’, which was altogether different from the zero-sum ‘progress’ championed by the capitalists, the racists and the social Darwinists:

14 – [The State] holds three religious beliefs above all others: Life is beautiful, and man, remade whole by freedom, has the right to live it magnificently; The whole man is the one who knows how to invent his own virtue every day in order to offer his brothers a new gift every day; Work, even the humblest, even the darkest, if well executed, tends towards beauty and adorns the world.

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The religious tone of Fiume’s constitution might lead to an easy misunderstanding. The spirituality of D’Annunzio and his followers was diametrically opposed to the bigoted conservatism of the official Church of the time. Fiume was a ‘city of life’, pervaded by an atmosphere of intense eroticism. Nudism was widely practised, even by the most prominent figures of government, in the name of a more authentic connection with nature. Women and men engaged in a polyamorous season that brought the local hospital’s ward for sexually transmitted diseases to its knees. Homosexuality was not merely tolerated, but it became a constitutive part of the ethos and aesthetics of the revolution. Looking from his balcony at some of his men going hand in hand towards a known cruising spot, D’Annunzio favourably remarked: ‘Look at my soldiers, they walk together in couples like the warriors of the ancient Theban legion’.[5] The beauty of naked bodies and the fire of youthful passions were living symbols of what the revolution wished to achieve.

‘An endless party’ is a recurrent description of D’Annunzio’s Fiume by those who took part in it. Street parties animated the days and nights of the town, amidst dancing, improvised parades, concerts and wild performances. Daring and dangerous practical jokes were celebrated as a novel form of art. Rivers of cocaine sustained the general excitement, in a joyous inversion of what would later become the regular use of amphetamines among the troops of the Second World War. The collective effort, it seemed, was aimed at suspending the flow of time. Indeed, Fiume could look no further than the instant of its present: clipped at the back by the recent past of the World War, its future rested inside the enemy cannons encircling the town. The revolution could live only for as long as the imagination allowed to extend the present.

Fig. 4: A group of arditi, Fiume, 2 October 1919. Public domain.

But how could they survive when access to food and supplies had been cut off? In this regard, too, the Mediterranean imagination aided the revolution. Looking into the past history of the region, D’Annunzio found the story of the Uscocchi pirates, who during the sixteenth century had fought against both the Venetians and the Ottomans, attacking their ships and selling the crews as slaves. The new Uscocchi of Fiume were tasked with a similar mission: capturing the passing ships, or hijacking those still in the ports, to take them to Fiume. The best targets were the cargo ships carrying food, clothes and weapons, but any kind of load could be resold, and the ships themselves could be held for ransom. A governmental department was dedicated to these kinds of activities: the Office for Sleights of Hand (ufcio colpi di mano). Their exploits became legendary, as when they slowly substituted each member in the crew of a cargo ship with their own men, or when a commando hid inside the coal deposit for days before suddenly emerging to take over the helm. […] The activities of the Uscocchi were crucial to feeding the starved town, but they were also an element of the ‘endless party’ of D’Annunzio and his followers. More than military actions, they were gestures of concrete poetry, trying to suspend the inevitable.

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After sixteen months of siege and five days of bloody fighting, on 29 December 1920, Fiume capitulated under the bombardment of the Italian navy. Far from bringing peace, the ‘Blood Christmas’ of Fiume started the countdown for another, much darker revolution. Less than two years later, Mussolini’s black shirts marched on Rome, inaugurating the ‘Fascist era’.

The 1920s shook the Mediterranean with the convulsive rhythm of a fever. Waves of reactionary, nationalist revolutions surged in quick succession, installing dictatorial regimes in Turkey in 1920, in Italy in 1922, in Spain in 1923, in Albania in 1925, in Greece and in Portugal in 1926 and in Yugoslavia in 1929. Despite their efforts, the anarchists, socialists, and radical democrats had failed to stem the totalitarian flood that would soon lead to the Second World War.

In this scenario, the experience of Fiume stood as a unique attempt to defuse the violence of the age through aesthetic sublimation, and to compose the contrasts between political extremes within a higher spiritual perspective. D’Annunzio’s charisma, at the time far more recognized than Mussolini’s, was supposed to guarantee the good success of this march against the course of history. But the impossible remained unachieved. And the catastrophes that followed engraved within the collective memory of the Mediterranean the lesson that achieving the impossible is, at times, the only possibility for a dignified life.

Notes

[1] G. D’Annunzio, ‘Lettera a Ludovico Toeplitz’, 8 March 1920, in L. Toeplitz, Ciak A Chi Tocca (Milano: Edizioni Milano Nuova, 1964), p. 57. My translation from the Italian original.

[2] G. D’Annunzio, ‘Lettera a Randolfo Vella’, Umanità Nuova, 9 June 1920, qtd. in R. de Felice, D’Annunzio Politico: 1918–1938 (RomaBari: Laterza, 1978), pp. 61–2. My translation from the Italian original.

[3] G. D’Annunzio, ‘Lettera a Giuseppe Giulietti’, 6 January 1920, in F. Gerra, L’Impresa di Fiume, 1: Fiume d’Italia (Milano, Longanesi, 1975), p. 232. My translation from the Italian original.

[4] L. Kochnitzky, La Quinta Stagione: o i Centauri di Fiume, trans. A. Luchini (Bologna, Zanichelli, 1922), p. 164. My translation from the Italian edition.

[5] G. Comisso, Le Mie Stagioni (Milano, Longanesi, 1963), p. 65.