Thomas's Reviews > The First Duce: D'Annunzio at Fiume

i was a bit sceptical of this to start with because the author became a reagan administration propagandist and world famous neocon shortly after writing this, but mostly it just uses archival sources to document what was happening in fiume under d'annunzio's occupation without too much stupid or right wing interpretation. there is a little bit of silly stuff around d'annunzio's supposed mastery and understanding of mass politics but that doesn't really take up much of the book. the book makes the case that the notion of d'annunzio as the 'john the baptist' of italian fascism is wrong, and it's reasonably convincing at this at least some of the time - d'annunzio seems to have genuinely moved to the left during the fiume occupation and might well have cemented a political alliance with the italian socialists(and perhaps the ussr at the international level) had they been willing to entertain the possibility. the information about the league of fiume, which was supposed to be an anti imperialist answer to the league of nations representing the oppressed peoples and nationalities of the world, is particularly interesting, although it seems pretty clear that d'annunzio never really had the resources to properly back such an enterprise. overall it is a cool little snapshot of a weird moment in history where a bunch of different avantgarde movements and the political right and left were all thrown together in a big utopian blender by an eccentric poet warrior who was singularly unsuited to being a politician.