Changes

|title=The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

|sort=Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War, The

|publisher=Fourth Estate

|date=August 2013

|summary=A biography of the many-sided Italian poet and playwright who became a national hero and inspiration to Mussolini, yet paradoxically is little remembered today.

}}

Gabriele d’Annunzio was a strange and perhaps fortunately unique character, a kind of 20th century Renaissance man who almost defies posterity to pigeonhole him. At various times he was a poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist, adventurer, self-styled demagogue and philanderer. Although he lost several friends during the First World War, as well as the sight of one eye when his plane was shot down, he had a passion for war, seeing bloodshed as manly and death in battle as glorious self-sacrifice. He had the dodgiest of moral compasses, and yet was hardly the Adonis he believed himself to be. One French courtesan who firmly rebuffed his physical advances later called him ‘a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth, bad breath and the manners of a mountebank’. Had he been alive today, he would have probably been an instant celebrity and media personality with a very short shelf-life.