Claudia Salaris

A country torn apart by the First World War. A people mourning over 650,000 fallen in the trenches. Politicians humiliated at the Versailles peace table. A poet-soldier who draws crowds to every rally. A city that becomes an emblem of irredentist and nationalist claims. It was in this Italy that the Fiume enterprise began on 12 September 1919: the adventure of Grabiele d'Annunzio and a handful of legionnaires who set out from Ronchi in Friuli, against the will of the established power, to occupy the Adriatic city and annex it to Italy, establish the Regency of Carnaro, and found a 'myth' destined to influence Italian and international culture and politics, aesthetics and vocabulary, well beyond the Twenty Years of Fascism.

Gabriele D'Annunzio - poet, novelist, playwright, journalist, soldier and politician - shaped Italian artistic, political and military life either side of 1900. Filmed entirely at the Vittoriale degli Italiani, the hillside citadel above Lake Garda where he spent his final years, the documentary moves through the house, the archive, the park, the amphitheatre and the mausoleum. Giordano Bruno Guerri, president of the Vittoriale foundation, leads a chaptered account of D'Annunzio's writing, his affairs, his politics and his military exploits, closing on his uneasy relationship with Mussolini, who admired and feared him in equal measure.