This was true for the entire army, but especially for the assault troops known as the arditi. During the war, the arditi had refused all weapons that would weigh them down: they preferred grenades carried in pockets and daggers held between teeth as they raced toward the enemy trenches, which they rarely reached. They liked to be called “alligators,” were partial to cocaine, and, among them, homosexuality was commonplace. No leader had been able to take for granted the loyalty of these highly volatile men. And now that the war was over, like the German Freikorps, they found no place for themselves in a society where the exhausted majority expected to return to a peaceful civilian life.

We cannot understand the events in Fiume (or the subsequent rise of fascism) without making an effort to imagine a world in which hundreds of thousands of young men who had been promised a share in the spoils of victory returned, after years both frightening and exhilarating—some of them half-blind or deaf, some insomniacs or addicts—to anxious mothers and wives unwilling to listen to their stories, to jobs in industries where bosses worried about productivity. They had known extreme anguish but also fleeting glory, and for a few years had been members of a warrior community where their powers and weaknesses were celebrated and acknowledged. Some of these men formed the core of D’Annunzio’s followers.

And why Fiume? At the end of World War I, a dispute exploded over the fate of the Istrian peninsula. Largely ruled by the Republic of Venice over the centuries, Istria became part of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1797. In the course of the nineteenth century, Fiume—the largest city on the peninsula—became one of the main ports of the northern Adriatic and the most prestigious resort for the Hungarian elite. The population in the countryside was mostly Slavic, but Fiume had a substantial, thriving Italian community that held the reins of economic power and had been slowly working to restitute the city to what they saw as its motherland. This community was fully justified in assuming that the Allied victory and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire represented the crucial occasion to achieve this goal: in the negotiations preceding Italy’s entry into the war, Great Britain and France promised to transfer Istria to the Italian government. Instead, the Versailles conference of 1919 sanctioned the formation of a new nation—the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia—whose territory, it now seemed, would include Istria. For the Italians in Fiume, this awful prospect was due to the incompetence and weakness of the Italian negotiators and had to be immediately corrected by the use of force. For the demobilized soldiers who roamed the country without any particular destination or place in bourgeois society, and for men like Gabriele D’Annunzio, Benito Mussolini, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, this denial of the fruits of victory was the most intolerable of humiliations. Talks started between the Italianists in Fiume and some of the new political leaders emerging in the ruins of postwar Italy. This is where D’Annunzio enters the story.

Gabriele D’Annunzio was the most prestigious Italian writer of the late nineteenth century. He was the author of realist novels, symbolist theater pieces, peculiar collections of poems, and exalted psychosexual melodramas. He had lived a life of luxury in Rome, Naples, Florence, and Paris, and wrote a work of musical theater, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, which was scored by Claude Debussy. But by the early 1910s, he probably felt that he was past his prime. This must have been at least part of the reason why he saw—and he was not alone in this—the war as the opportunity for a great renewal. By then in his fifties, he surprisingly became an aviator and, after a dazzling series of incursions into enemy territory, a war hero. He lost an eye in battle, but even this affliction was the occasion to write an eminently modern book called Nocturne. To the young, he was proof that the old Italy was still capable of magnificent exploits. It is also understandable that he feared that now that the fighting had ended, his personal decline of the prewar years would resume. He considered various options, including leading a march to Rome to overthrow the present government and undertaking an unprecedented, heroic flight from Venice to Tokyo—anything, except returning to the calm of his life as a fading, middle-aged writer. He began to make explosive speeches that called for the return of the great glory of Italy. He announced and demanded a conflagration that would restore the spiritual authority of the country. He thought that the loss of Fiume would have a profound symbolic dimension and that it was vital to recover the city.

It seemed to Fiume’s Italian elite that they had found their leader. D’Annunzio had developed connections with the arditi in Venice during the war and had shown himself perfectly capable of eliciting extraordinary enthusiasm in his followers. In September 1919, a band of a few hundred ex-combatants marched under his command toward Fiume. No one stopped them; on the contrary, the Italians among the Allied troops charged with guarding the city joined their cause. They entered Fiume, whose non-Slavic population initially received with euphoria the arrival of this strange leader who had never governed before, who had the vaguest political ideas, and who seemed to be mostly occupied in the tiring task of self-glorification. He professed a deep admiration for his young followers and gave endless speeches calling Fiume “the city of the Holocaust,” the place where the old world was going to end and still-unheard-of ways of life would develop.

The initial plan, however, was more modest: D’Annunzio intended to repatriate Istria to Italy. But the Italian government, which had accepted the resolutions made at Versailles, had no interest in this gift. The project soon began to mutate: if the Italian regime in power was too corrupt and cowardly—too easily dominated by the Americans and their sidekicks, the old Europeans—then the example of the troops at Fiume would unchain a mass movement that would overthrow it, and perhaps even elevate D’Annunzio to the position of leader of the nation. None of this happened. Instead, a tense standoff began. The embarrassed Italian government convinced the Allies that it would deal with the situation, which it argued was an internal matter. But lacking confidence in its own army, Italy didn’t attempt to take Fiume; rather, it instituted a partial siege, with the intention of keeping the revolt from expanding without entirely asphyxiating the population. Four months later, in December 1919, the Italian government presented to the National Council, which was the organ of the Italian community at Fiume, a formal declaration that it would work to impede the annexation of the city to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and a guarantee of either its annexation to Italy or, if this was not possible, its autonomy. This seemed good enough for the Fiumean citizens, who were not as convinced as before of the virtues of their new leader, and decided to accept it. But D’Annunzio was unwilling. Not yet. Perhaps never. Nor were the more radical youth who seconded him ready to abandon what they had begun to call the “City of Life.”

From the beginning, the coexistence of the diverse groups that gravitated around D’Annunzio had been difficult. There were the citizens of Fiume and the Italian troops (the arditi, the carabinieri), but also Bolsheviks who rushed to the city (in a Moscow speech, Lenin said he and D’Annunzio were the only authentic revolutionaries of Europe); anarcho-syndicalists; futuristic, fascist Dadaists; and oddities like the curious war hero Guido Keller, whose mascot was an eagle, who slept naked in the tops of trees, and who was one of the new commander’s main lieutenants. The universe around the leader quickly fragmented into factions. Forced to take sides, D’Annunzio came to rely mostly on the young artists, anarchists, and arditi who constituted the radical wing of the grand alliance of Fiume, and who formed the “Union of Free Spirits Tending Toward Perfection” (or, as they nicknamed it, “Yoga”). The group shared an enthusiasm for Hinduism, spiritual aristocracy, nudism, and for building an agrarian utopia where preindustrial forms of life would be restored. Subgroups were formed: the Brown Lotuses, who wanted to lead a simple life and professed a return to nature; the Red Lotuses, who proclaimed the arrival of a new world transfigured by a renewed sexuality; and a group who identified themselves as the followers of a still-undefined “Sacred Love.”