A tale of two cities? Gabriele D’Annunzio in Rijeka and Fiume

The inhabitants of Fiume cheering D'annunzio and his raiders CC/Public Domain

Friday’s newspapers were full of it. “Neofascists strike at Rijeka,” screamed the local daily Novi list. The front page of the national paper Jutarnji list was, if anything, even more alarming, declaring “Fascists attempt to reach Rijeka in three planes”. The planes in question were small private aircraft; 16 people were briefly detained and then sent home.

It was not the first time that Rijeka (which, formerly known as Fiume, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and then Italy until 1945) had been visited by Italians bearing flags. September 12th was the 100th anniversary of the entry into the city of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian writer, war hero, and national ideologue who ended up ruling over the city for the next 16 months.

Wounded pride

The 2019 “invasion” of Rijeka went largely unnoticed by the inhabitants of the city itself. There was no sign of extra security on the streets. The opening of D’Annunzio’s Martyr, an exhibition marking the centenary of the soldier-poet’s occupation, was only lightly policed, despite the attendance of the Croatian minister of culture and Rijeka’s city mayor. The only openly D’Annunzian fan I caught sight of was a young man in a green Arditi D’Italia T-shirt (the Arditi were Italian First World War shock troops, many of whom followed D’Annunzio to Rijeka) who was touring the city’s second-hand bookshop in search of titles about the Fiume of yore. As one of the bookshop owners told me, interest in Fiume-related nostalgia had always been lively, and there was not really a great deal left to sell.

If there was a whiff of wounded Rijeka pride in the air it was due to events 80 kilometres northeast in Trieste, where the city’s right-of-centre mayor, Roberto Dipiazza, unveiled a statue of Gabriele D’Annunzio on the central Piazza della Borsa. It is unlikely that the statue would have drawn any comment had it been inaugurated on any day other than September 12th. However the highly-charged timing drew an immediate response from Croatia, whose foreign ministry sent a note of protest to the Italian ambassador in Zagreb. Croatian president Kolinda Grabar Kitarović called the statue “unacceptable… a scandalous monument to division”.

It is unlikely this diplomatic storm in a teacup will go any further – at least not until the next big anniversary in 2119. However there has always been a great deal of ambiguity surrounding D’Annunzio’s Rijeka escapade, and his heritage remains enduringly attractive to those drawn to political flamboyance, robust patriotism, and a disregard for what others might think. Populism, at least in Italy, has a very long history.

Precursors of Italian fascism

Known in Italian as Impresa di Fiume (or the Fiume Enterprise),  D’Annunzio’s occupation of Rijeka in 1919-21 was one of the more unusual episodes in 20th century Europe, a forewarning of the marches, mass politics and forced border changes that seem nowadays to have characterised the build-up to the Second World War. Many of D’Annunzio’s innovations – uniformed parades, balcony speeches, patriotic rituals and Roman salutes – were later adopted by Benito Mussolini, leading many to see D’Annunzio as one of the key precursors of Italian fascism. However D’Annunzio also presided over an explosion of libertarianism: thousands of young Italians who came to join him in Rijeka found a city where the restrictive morals of mainland Italy did not apply. If you wanted free love, artistic freedom, drugs and a festivalesque sense of flag-waving national community, you were more likely to find it in Rijeka than in Rome.

D’Annunzio’s Rijeka Enterprise was, however, underwritten by ethnic nationalist assumptions. Rijeka was a contested city in 1919; its city centre had an Italian-speaking majority while the suburbs were predominantly Croatian. The great powers meeting at the Versailles Peace Conference looked set to award the city to the nascent Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (better known as Yugoslavia), and radical members of Rijeka’s Italian community sought to pre-empt this decision by taking control of the city and unilaterally declaring its annexation with Italy. D’Annunzio, the writer and decorated war hero who was also a leading ideologue of Italian expansion in the eastern Adriatic, was the figurehead they chose.

The Italian government disowned the project and D’Annunzio was very much left to his own devices, presiding over a city swelled by an influx of Italian ex-servicemen and idealistic patriots. His administration was a revolving door of nationalist conservatives and radical dreamers; non-Italians were harassed into abandoning their businesses and leaving town. D’Annunzio ignored the results of a December 18th plebiscite that would have ensured his peaceful departure, basing his power instead on the uniformed young men who roved the city and attended his rallies. The city was a social and economic ruin when D’Annunzio was finally forced out by regular Italian troops in January 1921.

One-sided story

It is the idea of D’Annunzio, as political innovator and patriotic rebel, that provided the dominant tone to Disobbedisco (“I Disobey”), an exhibition devoted to the Rijeka Enterprise that was held in Trieste’s Salone degli Incanti (a magnificent former fish market) between June and November this year. Opening with the gleaming bodywork of a Fiat T-4, the vehicle which the poet entered Rijeka on the morning of September 12th 1919, and continuing with uniforms, firearms and flags, the exhibition was a tour-de-force of narrative history-telling. Accompanying captions described Rijeka under D’Annunzio as an “experiment in revolution”, a rebel city that attracted artists, intellectuals, ex-soldiers and non-conformists from all over Italy. However the non-Italian inhabitants of Rijeka were largely absent from the exhibition’s narrative, conveying the impression that the whole enterprise was a purely Italian affair, which impinged little on others.

Disobbedisco’s claim that D’Annunzio was a radical political innovator rested rather too heavily on its interpretation of the Kvarner Charter (Carta del Carnaro), the “constitution” co-authored by D’Annunzio and the Italian anarcho-syndicalist, Alceste de Ambris, promising equality regardless of race, sex or religion; it also foresaw a system of democracy based on corporate theory – in which citizens would be organised according to occupation and interest group. However the Charter was never enacted, and the workings of the corporate system were never fully elaborated: it was a PR exercise undertaken by a regime that was losing domestic support and had few external allies.

According to the exhibition’s notes, D’Annunzio and his followers introduced “a new way of doing politics, based on the centrality of the commander”, involving mass meetings, propaganda, and “the marginalisation of opponents.” (Who the opponents were, and how they were marginalised, was never made clear). A flyer given out to visitors at the ticket desk was emblazoned with the words “the Fiume Endeavour was not a Fascist Action”, as if to disentangle the radical heritage of D’Annunzio from that of his right-wing contemporaries. The fact that ethnic nationalism, military ritual, and pseudo-democracy can be considered Dannunzian rather than Fascist does not, however, make them any more deserving of our admiration.

The exhibition was curated by Giordano Bruno Guerri, who is also head of the Vittoriale, D’Annunzio’s former home on the western shores of Lake Garda. Guerri made full use of the D’Annunzio archives housed at the Vittoriale in his recent book Disobbedisco: cinquecento giorni di revoluzione (published in March 2019), which presents a much more detailed, blow-by-blow, account of D’Annunzio’s period in Rijeka. However Guerri is careful about which parts of the story he tells, leaving us with a feel-good D’Annunzio who did his best for Italy and left a positive, idealistic legacy.

In the middle of the Disobbedisco exhibition was a video screen showing a 15-minute film, in which Guerri explains D’Annunzio’s Enterprise and the inspirational effect it had on young Italian people. The video was on a constant loop; one heard Guerri’s voice again and again, echoing off the walls, with the words “D’Annunzio was not a Fascist” repeating themselves like a mantra. It was at that point that one realised that, for Guerri at least, D’Annunzio was a brand, and the exhibition was his commercial.

Bridging narratives

Offering something of a corrective to the carefully massaged story of Disobbedisco is D’Annunzio’s Martyr, the smaller and rather less celebratory exhibition that opened at Rijeka’s Maritime and History Museum on September 12th. The exhibition has much less in the way of original artefacts and relies heavily on reproduction pictures mounted on large panels. In many ways the key exhibit is the building itself, the opulent former Governor’s Palace in which D’Annunzio held court. A theatrical pile of rubble, placed on the floor of the so-called White Salon, marks the spot where a naval shell landed when the Italian government finally decided to take action against D’Annunzio in December 1920. The exhibition does have a stunning collection of archive pictures, projected onto one of the walls, showing civilians and soldiers as well as the main actors in the D’Annunzio story.

The exhibition pays particular attention to Rijeka’s women, providing a social-history perspective that saves it from the great-man approach on offer elsewhere. Rijeka was a relatively liberated city even before D’Annunzio’s arrival; there was a large female workforce in the city’s factories, and the impact of war sped up the blurring of traditional gender roles. Rijeka’s women were involved in nationalist agitation on both the Italian and Croatian sides; and women played a large role in the mass demonstrations that – in the early days of the Enterprise at least – acclaimed D’Annunzio as the city’s new ruler. Crucial to the narrative is the diary of Dora Blažić, a young Croatian woman who lived under the D’Annunzio regime and who provides us with an intimate perspective on how hard life was for non-Italians still left in the city. This focus on the female side of history contrasts sharply with the exhibition in Trieste, with its display cases full of medals, pistols, banners, sashes and other paraphernalia of a male elite.

While the Rijeka exhibition is clear in portraying a city that was abandoned by D’Annunzio and left in a state of ruin, it steers clear of any direct national agenda. Indeed, the exhibition’s great virtue is that it brings the narratives of Fiume and Rijeka back together again, and reminds us that both are in fact the same city.

Reflection of today

As far as D’Annunzio’s place in the history of the radical right is concerned, perhaps the best portrayal comes not from the exhibition but the recent historical novel M, Antonio Scurati’s monumental account of Mussolini’s rise to power. The book suggestively sketches the interaction between D’Annunzio and Mussolini, and the way in which the political practice of both leaders emerged from a collection of shared attitudes: Italy won the war and must get its just desserts, parliamentary democracy is rubbish, and the socialists will sell us out to a bunch of foreigners.

To ask whether D’Annunzio was a fascist or not is, in any case, to pose the wrong question. Not even Mussolini knew what fascism was in 1919, and always steered clear of defining it in terms of a doctrine. Much more important is to ask why D’Annunzio marched under arms into a contested city, and why did he brazenly – indeed shamelessly – insist on the political and cultural superiority of only one of that city’s ethnic groups. The Fiume Enterprise belongs to the world of border changes, forced population movements, and pre-emptive strikes. And if D’Annunzio’s transgressions can be excused – even praised – then so can any other flouting of the rules: the German solution to the “Austrian Question” in 1938, the creation of an independent Serbian Krajina in Croatia in 1990-91, or Russia foisting war in Donbas in 2014.

The idea that D’Annunzio was a freedom-loving political pirate who ignored the system-politicians in Rome, raised the middle finger to the international order, and simply ignored the aspirations of Slav peoples who in his eyes belonged to a lesser, non-Mediterranean civilisation, makes him something of an ideal hero in our instantly judgmental times. Indeed historical exhibitions frequently tell us as much about the preoccupations of the present age as they do about the subjects they are covering. The main message of Disobbedisco seems to be that the radical right can celebrate their illiberal heritage without having to mention Mussolini. The intimate, inclusive approach of D’Annunzio’s Martyr, on the other hand, suggests that popular history can still provide the impetus to more thoughtful reflection.

Jonathan Bousfield is a Zagreb-based writer specialising in Central European history and culture. He is also the author of Rough Guides to both Croatia and Poland.

Gabriele D’Annunzio