For 15 months straddling 1919 and 1920, d’Annunzio ruled as a poet-soldier-dictator over the autonomous Free State of Fiume in a small patch of what is today Croatia.

With Italian nationalism back in vogue, so apparently is d’Annunzio, at least among Italy’s right wing, which has claimed the decadent, priapic and prolific literary genius as one of its own.

“The great d’Annunzio,” Matteo Salvini, Italy’s most popular nationalist politician, has called him.

Some of d’Annunzio’s modern-day fans have sought to rescue the poet, sometimes referred to as “the Bard,” from the stigma of Fascism.

Last spring, the president of the Vittoriale degli Italiani, the museum that has been made out of d’Annunzio’s former pleasure palace on Lake Garda, curated an exhibit on Trieste’s waterfront to mark the 100th anniversary of the Fiume campaign.

“The Fiume campaign wasn’t Fascist, just like Gabriele d’Annunzio wasn’t,” the president, Giordano Bruno Guerri, wrote in the exhibit’s catalog.

In an interview, Mr. Guerri said that during his visit to Trieste in preparation for the exhibit, he walked with Trieste’s center-right mayor, Roberto Dipiazza, past a statue of one of the city’s native poets. The mayor then proposed a statue of d’Annunzio for Trieste and the curator told him he was in luck, he had a spare mold to make one from.