Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes a blog in the style of Gabriele d'Annunzio

I don’t much like talking about myself, but Gabriele d’Annunzio loved to do so. Let this be his blog.  He enjoyed making lists.

People whom he thought he resembled, and why:

Julius Caesar (because they were both bald, and invincible in love and war alike)

Dante (the only great Italian poet, he thought, before himself)

Horatio Nelson (another small, one-eyed war-hero)

Byron (like d’Annunzio, compulsively promiscuous and a great swimmer)

St Francis (in later life, d’Annunzio took to wearing a Franciscan-style habit, but because he didn’t really want to mortify the flesh, he always wore a mauve silk shift under it)

Some favourite things:

War

The scent of oranges

The slithery feel of a greyhound’s coat

The way his lover Eleonora Duse wiped her tears upwards onto her temples when he made her cry

Rain falling on violets

Cocaine

Things he detested:

Sleeping in hotel sheets (he always brought his own)

The Hapsburg empire (but one of his best friends was an Austrian prince)

Brass bands

Monogamy

Things he wrote to Mussolini:

 ‘You stay there chattering while we struggle… You tremble with fear!... You little pig!’ (1919)

 ‘Am I not the precursor of all that is good about Fascism?’ (1932)