A poet leading a band of more than 2,000 rebellious Italian soldiers conquered a city without firing a single shot on September 12, 1919. That guy, a short man capable of modulating his metallic voice when he saw a woman or hypnotized women. masses, he was the closest thing to a rock star in a time devoid of myths.
Gabriele d'Annunzio that day entered a city hidden between forests and doomed to a gulf on the eastern Adriatic coast in the back seat of a maroon Fiat T surrounded by tanks stolen from the Italian army.
"Go ahead, shoot these medals," he challenged the soldiers who pointed at him to stop him.
Instead, he received a hug.
Rijeka, then known as Fiume (both mean river), is today the third most important city in Croatia and a port that fed all of Tito's Yugoslavia.
That day crystallized the thirst for adventure, nationalism and avant-garde.
But also the vindication of what Italy had failed to annex in the dispatches to its territory after the First World War: the mutilated Victory, as defined by the poet prophesying his company.
His inheritance, after 16 months of bizarre occupation and a libertarian republic, was one of the most revolutionary constitutions in Europe, which is now 100 years old.
Seen in today's light, rather than fascism, as the regime tried to make believe for years,
La Carta del Carnaro
rather anticipated phenomena such as May '68.
A curvy road winds its way down a forested mountain lined with roast-pig bars and old money exchange offices that herald the entry into Croatia.
The slope reaches to the Dead Channel, a water inlet that slashes Rijeka (128,000 inhabitants) from the Adriatic and that for a time served as a frontier in one of many passages in its violent history.
The city, frustrated European capital of culture 2020 because of the pandemic, lives today according to Croatian laws and traditions.
But a small community of 2,500 people, registered in the registry as "Italian", still claims the 500 days that made up Fiume's company.
The city has belonged to seven nations in 150 years and has endured bloody wars.
D'Annunzio's adventure, despite the countless scars and the fact that some streets still retain their names in Italian and Hungarian, is still taboo among other citizens.
A milestone in which they only see a test tube of fascism that would end up imposing itself in Italy and shaking a Europe adrift.
The 22-year-old Rijeka mayor, the Social Democrat Vojko Obersnel, has no doubts.
“There are great discussions about D'Annunzio.
Last year was the 100th anniversary of the occupation, although some call it liberation.
Here many Croats suffered enormous vicissitudes.
Crimes were committed, we were later occupied by the Italians during fascism ... but it all started with D'Annunzio ”, he points out in his office in the city center at the end of October.
A vision that prevailed in Italy for years on that company and that turned with the study of historians such as Renzo de Felice on the adventures that made it up.
But, above all, with the constitution in which it ended.
A document drawn up by the socialist trade unionist Alceste de Ambris, which included universal suffrage for women, free drug use, divorce, freedom of belief or the right to homosexual relations.
No one ever saw anything like it.
Antonio Scurati, author of the two volumes of the trilogy that will make up a titanic fictionalized biography of Mussolini —M.
The son of the century (Alfaguara, 2020) and the recently published in Italy M. el hombre de la providencia— does not hesitate to disassociate him from fascism.
“The reading that we must give today in a posideological phase is that it was a real adventure, in every way.
There was something of audacity in an unheard of journey into the unknown.
It was a grand opening, as if the historical fabric were cracking and creating a hole that could have led to unthinkable places.
He anticipated trends, events and changes that will come 50 years later, such as May 68. It was an avant-garde of artists who experimented with social practices and customs so that they became the patrimony of all.
Its meaning was not unique at the time it happened.
It could have led to a different future.
It could have been something progressive and emancipating. "
What came next, however, was not so
Gabriele D'Annunzio, nicknamed Il Vate for his ability to lead the masses, is the cocktail shaker where passions, anguish, hunger for horizons and new certainties of the Italy that incubated the monster mixed.
Writer and poet, light aircraft pilot who was left one-eyed in a water landing and flew over Vienna in times of the Great War to cover it with leaflets, he led a group of men with a "thirst for wind and storm", as the aviator said, dandy — he was traveling in his airplane with a cup of tea and biscuits — and fellow traveler, Guido Keller.
The avant-gardes in Italy manifested themselves aggressively through the futurism of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and found in that passion for war an intersection with the nationalist impulses of Enrico Corradini.
Also to recover the unredeemed lands under Austro-Hungarian rule: Trentino, Venezia Giulia and the eastern coast of the Adriatic, where the Dalmazia and Fiume were located.
An unfulfilled promise by the American Woodrow Wilson that the poet wanted to remedy.
In 1914 D'Annunzio was 51 years old and already one of the most famous Italians in the world.
He had published novels appreciated by Robert Musil, Marcel Proust or Henry James.
He wrote in newspapers - especially in
Il Corriere della Sera
- about any argument with poignant prose and had already published a large part of his poetic work.
Obsessed with women and sex, blind in one eye and only 1.64 meters tall, he entered the world of the aristocracy at the hands of notable female representatives.
In 1915, when few in Italy knew who Mussolini was, D'Annunzio was already a myth.
Emilio Gentile, one of the leading experts in the history of fascism, agrees that the Fiumian experience and the Carta del Carnaro cannot be considered a proto-fascist example.
“When Mussolini transformed the movement into a party in 1921 he said that fascism had nothing to take from that Constitution.
In fact, it was much harsher and assured that it was absolutely useless as a political document.
They have nothing to do with it".
The origin of both characters, also their intellectual depth and their political trajectory, was already diverse at that time.
D'Annunzio synthesizes that mixture of poet and warrior.
Mussolini, on the other hand, a journalist who had just founded his Italian Combat Fascios, awaited his political opportunity and did not want to participate in that contest so as not to send it to hell.
Bruno Giordano Guerri, president of the Vittoriale degli Italiani foundation (in the place that was the poet's house on Lake Garda) and author of
Disobbedisco
, the frenetic story of the conquest of Fiume, believes that this, and the government's refusal Italian - then chaired by Giovanni Giolitti - to support that madness, changed the course of the expedition.
“He transformed a nationalist company into a revolutionary one.
The problem for D'Annunzio in 1920 was no longer to annex Fiume to Italy, but to annex Italy to Fiume: to make revolution throughout the country ”.
That commune on the Adriatic, to which people attracted by that promise of freedom made pilgrimages, lasted little more than a year.
It cost D'Annunzio a cocaine addiction and another war wound.
Italy was fed up with the invention, bombed the city and one of the projectiles hit the Government Palace where the poet lived.
He was forced to cede power to a free state, recognized by the Kingdom of Italy and Yugoslavia.
In 1924, already with Mussolini, it again passed into Italian hands.
By then, the Duce had already copied everything he needed from D'Annunzio: the speeches from the balcony, the famous “me ne frego”, the idea of dialoguing with the masses from a balcony in an illusion of horizontality.
“Mussolini gave Fiume a fascist character.
But all its protagonists were not.
De Ambris died in France in exile, Mario Magri, the capo of D'Annunzio's pirates, served 17 years in prison during fascism.
History is written by the victors, but sometimes there are extravagances that make Italy and many people still believe in Mussolini's version.
No historical from the middle of the 1950s thinks like that ”, says Guerri.
The city went into crisis.
It went from about 180,000 inhabitants at the end of the 20th century to 128,000 today (82% are Croatian and 6.5% Serbian).
The Italian drive comes only from that 2% that looks at those memories with a certain melancholy.
Many, such as Moreno Vrancic, a member of the Italian Community, complain that their identity, which is recorded in the registry as “Italian nationality”, is not sufficiently respected, even though they do not have the citizenship of the country to which they feel attached.
“The mayor promised to put the Italian name of the city at the entrance.
But he still does not do it ”, laments his association at the headquarters.
Fiume's times are getting further and further away from Rijeka.