The Poet's Balcony, by Mark Jacobson

A visit to the throne of poet, warrior, hedonist, Gabriele D’Annunzio inspirer, of Benito Mussolini.

Mark Jacobson is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has been a contributing editor at New York magazine, Rolling Stone and Esquire. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, National Geographic, Natural History magazine, The New York Times and Men's Journal. He is the founder and host of NYC’s famed KGB Journalist Reading series, now in its 33^rd year.

I remember it well, that upstate New York family trip when Dad broadsided that deer on US 20. My sister Paula and I, in the backseat as always, saw the beast first, in the periphery of the windshield and let out a yell. Dad tried to miss it but didn't quite. This was followed by the dull thud that often accompanies transit between life and death.

Moments later, Paula and I, at least the pre-teen versions of ourselves, were watching a mix of deer blood and blue-green anti-freeze trickle across the blacktop when the tow truck arrived. The driver hooked up the car and then asked our parents if they wanted to "keep the deer." That's what people around those parts did when they hit "big ones," the driver said, hack off the animal's head with a chainsaw and barbecue the rest. Mom and Dad could tie the shattered carcass to the roof rack of the Dodge Polara wagon, drive it home, put it in the freezer.

The parents didn't answer, not at first. After all, they were New Yorkers, born and bred, never out of Brooklyn until my father signed up to fight the Nazis. Animal heads mounted on living room walls and frozen venison was not part of their routine. "No! We don't want to keep the deer," Mom finally shouted, her tenement-born accent echoing amid the piney woods. That Polara had set the family back a pretty penny, and this stupid deer had wrecked it, sending the car off to some bumpkin garage where they probably chewed tobacco, spit, and charged whatever they wanted because they knew they had you by short hairs. Why would they want a souvenir of that? "No," Mom shouted again and louder. "We don't want your stinking deer. You keep it."

More than sixty years later, Paula and I still laugh about "the deer," one of our first, and best, travel tales. Over the years there have been many more stories because we have continued to travel together, to every far point of the globe, to China, India, Panama, eastern Europe and the Okefenokee Swamp in a leaky kayak. Sibling travel might not have the flash of a White Lotus weekend but at least you know what to expect, that common reservoir of anxieties, gallows humor and the assurance that whatever went wrong, more was likely to go right. This is no small thing when disembarking La Paz, Bolivia at three in the morning to an airport full of soldiers and your luggage is lost somewhere in the ozone.

When people get old, they tend to talk about "bucket lists," places they feel they should see before they croak: the Taj, Victoria Falls, the rock from where Jesus/Muhammad/whomever rose to Heaven, you name it. Paula and I follow no such agenda. We hunt for our own version of "power spots," venues that have nothing to do with micro-dosing tech bros staring into "vortexes" in Sedona, Arizona. Our power spots tend to be ephemeral, idiosyncratic, more in the newspapers than the second-hand Frommer's travel book. They are places where the vagaries of history, geography, and heightened human desire come together to open a portal through which, if you know where and how to look, you can gain a degree of insight into how life is lived today.

Places like The Poet's Balcony. That's where we were going a few months ago, a couple of weeks before the last American presidential election. We were on a pea-green Fixx bus, out of our beloved city of Trieste, Italy, passing through about ten minutes of Slovenia and into the Croatian hinterlands. We were bound for the hardscrabble port city of Rijeka, to see the spot where for 15 crazed, pivotal months following The Great War, Gabriele D'Annunzio, a.k.a. The Poet, writer, lothario, war hero and supposed inventor of modern Fascism once held sway over a city-state of his own fevered imagination.

To get the gist of this adventure, some history is in order. To wit: Istria, the mountainous region of the upper Balkans where Rijeka is located has long been a marching ground of conquest. The Romans, Charlemagne, Venetian traders, Ottoman sultans are just a few of the A-list imperiums that have ruled here. In 1466 the area fell under the sway of Habsburgs, whose Austrian-Hungarian empire controlled the territory for more than 400 years until their defeat in World War One, leaving the area in jurisdiction dispute, without borders and clear sovereignty.

Into this void in the late summer of 1919 rode D'Annunzio at the wheel of his Fiat Tipo 4. Behind him was a column of ragtag adherents, all of them intensely devoted to the Poet and his declared mission of making Rijeka, or Fiume as it was then called, part of the modern state of Italy. Reaching the city in September of 1919 (D'Annunzio called it "The Sacred Entry"), the Poet took up residence in the former Habsburg Government House, an ornate building which included a twenty-foot-wide balcony overlooking the city docks and the blue Bay of Kvarner beyond. The balcony became the Poet's podium, his pulpit, his throne. It was here he appeared, often on a daily basis to alternately rally, berate, beguile and make virtual love to his thousands of loyal subjects, sometimes reading to them from his famous works late into the night like a giant slumber party.

It was a little crazy, Paula and I thought, coming all this way to see a balcony. Only weeks before we'd barely heard of Gabriele D'Annunzio. Educated in America, we knew little of The Poet's immense celebrity, his enormous fin de siècle cult of personality, his literary fame that prompted no less than James Joyce to declare him a talent "second only" to Gustav Flaubert. (Marcel Proust and Henry James were also ardent fans.) Paula and I were not aware of D'Annunzio's high society reputation, despite his small stature, unprepossessing looks and rotting teeth, as one the Continent's greatest lovers, a sex-mad aesthete who claimed to have seduced over 1000 women (he was renowned for his cunnilingus skills) all the while carrying on long-term relationships with Eleonora Duse, Europe's best known actress and socialite Luisa Casati.

These Age of Decadence passions dominated his work, which is filled with florid passages like this one from his 1889 novel Child of Pleasure. "What deep sweetness!" the Poet writes. "There are women's mouths that seem to ignite with love the breath that opens them whether they are reddened by blood richer than purple, or frozen by the pallor of agony, or darkened by the shadow of disdain." It is this "constant discord between the expression of the lips and that of the eyes that generates the mystery" that captivates the man of intellect, D'Annunzio goes on. "As if a duplicitous soul reveals itself there with a different beauty, happy and sad, cold and passionate, cruel and merciful that arouses discomfort in the spirit that takes pleasure in dark things."

But if there was anything that so motivated the Poet as much as the women he loved and bedded, it was war. It was this ardor for mano-a-mano conflict that, at the relatively advanced age of 52, prompted him to declare himself done with foppish writer's society life and volunteer to fight with the recently reorganized Italian armed forces which had entered the Great War on the side of the allies.

Captivated by the sleekness and speed of modern technology (he was one of the first Italians to own a car and fly in a plane) D'Annunzio distinguished himself as an aviator, both planning and taking part in a daring low-altitude sortie over Vienna during which he reportedly tossed 50,000 self-penned propaganda leaflets from the open cockpit of a bi-plane. "VIENNESE!" the Poet's fluttering leaflets said. "We are flying above Vienna, we could launch tons of bombs. We do not launch anything but a three-color greeting to the three colors of freedom... VIENNESE! You have a reputation for being clever. Then why are you wearing the Prussian uniform? By now, you can see, the entire world is against you. To continue will be your suicide. Is that what you hope for?" In Italy, a nation equally besotted by reverence for writers Virgil and Dante as well as yearning for the vanished power and glory of the greatest of ancient Empires, D'Annunzio became more than a national bard. He was the return of the centurion soul of Patria.

"Blessed are the twenty-year-olds," the Poet wrote, "pure of mind, well-tempered in body, with courageous mothers. Blessed are they who, waiting with confidence, do not dissipate their strength but guard it in the discipline of the warrior. Blessed are they who disdain sterile love-affairs to be virgins for this first and last love. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for glory, for they shall be sated. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall have splendid blood to wipe away, radiant pain to bind up."

These were the sentiments that attracted young, ambitious men like Benito Mussolini, a nondescript editor of a socialist newspaper before D'Annunzio extended to him the favor of his attention. Entranced, Italy's future leader took much from the Poet.

If D'Annunzio chose to surround himself with a personal police force called the "arditi," a phalanx of strapping young men in black shirts, Mussolini copied that. If D'Annunzio used the stiff-armed Roman salute and instructed his legionnaires to greet each other with shouts of "eia, eia, alala," a phrase first uttered by Achilles in the Iliad, Mussolini did that too. If D'Annunzio prescribed massive doses of castor oil be administered to the perceived enemies of his mercurial city-state, Mussolini followed suit.

But what Mussolini really learned from D'Annunzio was the use of the balcony, how even a small man standing on a raised marble platform could look 100 feet tall, become "Il Duce."

It was The Poet's influence on Mussolini and others like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto which called for Italian youth to smash the suffocating grip of the country's omnipresent past ("heap fire with shelves of libraries, divert canals to flood the cellars of the museums...wreck, wreck, wreck!" Marinetti exhorted) that saddled the Poet with the title he always disdained, The John the Baptist of Fascism.

That was what got our attention, why we needed to see the Poet's balcony. In a world of ultimate media power, we felt it was important to track backwards, through the blizzard of AI, Instagram posts and TikTok, the advent of television and radio, beyond the world of southern politicians roving the bayous in sound trucks, to a single megalomaniac on a balcony.

More than a century after the Poet's "Sacred Entry," when Paula and I arrived at Rijeka's modest bus station, the town appeared to be in a long-term process of coping. The Korzo, the main shopping street, was busy, but riddled with empty storefronts. The cafes were pleasant enough but filled with chain-smokers. The docks which once thrived as the Habsburg's second leading port, seemed largely abandoned except for a host of gleaming yachts cordoned off from the workaday world. Centuries of conquest, including the horrific 1990's Yugoslavian war, had taken its toll.

Paula and I checked into Hotel Continental. Built in 1888 as a gem of the Austrian-Hungarian gilded age, the Continental once welcomed many of the star-studded array of guests who came to visit D'Annunzio, people like Guglielmo Marconi, the celebrated inventor of the telegraph, whom The Poet hoped would build a far-flung radio network to carry his voice to the great capitals of the globe. Now, however, the management of the Continental, having survived decades of austerity, felt it necessary to leave a notice in each room apologizing in advance if guests felt the accommodations were not up to expectations.

Most current Rijeka locals had little knowledge of D'Annunzio's short-lived reign. Those who had heard of The Poet were quick to dismiss him as "nothing but a fascist," a ghost left over from one of many unpleasant past episodes. The general opinion was summed up by local scholar Tea Perinic whose book "Rijeka or Death" (a play on The Poet's melodramatic rallying cry "Fiume o Morte"), who characterized The Poet's reign as little more than a colossal bit of self-serving performance art, an "decadent expression" of an "immense ego."

There were, however, other views. As an attendant at the Rijeka Tunnel, a 1000-foot-long air raid shelter built during WW2 told us, the Poet, who did little beyond entertaining his mistresses and reading poems from his balcony, may have had his shortcomings as a head of state. But he did oversee the writing of the "most progressive, most fun, most pro-art constitution ever written in Europe."

Indeed, in December of 1920, The Poet did take to his balcony to announce that Fiume would henceforth be known as The Italian Regency of Carnaro with himself as chief regent, or comandante. He then proceeded to read the text of the Charter of Carnaro, the new law of the land. Included in the state bureaucracy was a "Council of the Best," designed to represent "superior individuals," artists, scientists, and poets who were to be elected through universal suffrage for a three-year term. Along with guaranteed rights regardless of sex, class or race, the Charter decreed music to be a never infringed upon "religious and social institution of the state." After the charter announcement, V.I. Lenin, the newly installed leader of the Soviet Union, certainly no fascist, sent D'Annunzio a cache of prime Bolshevik caviar, calling him "the only true revolutionary in Europe."

Rather than a goose stepping fascist utopia, or a wet dream of an off-world colony ruled by a South African peddler of electric cars, the Italian Regency of Carnaro was becoming an outpost of ultra bohemian behavior, an intellectual's Sodom and Gomorrah, a pre-Fellini movie where sexual differences like homosexuality were not only tolerated but encouraged. It was no big deal to see gangs of the Poet's fearsome "arditi" walking around without their black shirts but completely naked with daggers clenched between the teeth in a self-styled cartoon of Roman legionnaires. Non-conformists of all stripes began to flock to this proto-Haight-Ashbury, an enclave where, as William Burroughs later would say, "everything is permitted." The Regency became a center of vice and drugs, mostly cocaine, a fair amount of which was consumed by the Poet himself.

The party ended in the last days of 1920 when the Italian government, anxious to establish itself as a full member of the post-War world and weary of the increasing demands of its most famous writer and war hero since Garibaldi, attempted to get D'Annunzio to abdicate. When The Poet refused, the Italians sent the warship Andrea Doria to sit menacingly in the Regency's harbor. Defiant, d'Annunzio took to his balcony to exhort his people, shouting "if God is with us, who is against us?" It was a non-stop filibuster, pausing only for D'Annunzio to eat, have sex and get high.

For D'Annunzio, the situation was intolerable. He'd given everything to create a modern Italy that was a worthy successor to Rome and now these jackals, these imagination-free bean-counters, bankers and worse, were threatening to destroy the glorious Italian enclave he'd built. Violence broke out in the streets, what the Poet called "Bloody Christmas," but he continued to speak, stopping only when a single round from the Andrea Doria hit the Government House, destroying much of the balcony. Only then, his holy pulpit in ruins, did the Poet give up, leaving the Regency a few days later, never to return.

All these years later, the Poet's Balcony, long since repaired, remains attached to the front of the Poet's former palace, now home to The Maritime and Historical Museum of the Croatian Littoral. Paula and I went up to the second floor, into the elegant "white salon," hoping to gain access to the balcony, to see what the Poet saw, feel what he felt. But the glass-paneled doors were locked. As one of the curators told us, the balcony was not open to the public. If we wanted to learn more about The Poet, the museum had devoted a room to him down the hallway.

And there it was, the Poet's desk, several portraits of him, the flag of the Regency of Carnaro, a field of red with stars highlighted by an ouroboros, the ancient image of the snake swallowing its own tail, symbolizing the cyclical nature of things. Also there was the Poet's trademark writing tools, two glass pots of ink set in between an array of large caliber bullets. The room was cramped, but not inappropriately so. In the long, often brutal history of what was now northern Croatia, The Poet and his balcony had been but a blip.

Back in Trieste, spending our requisite four to five hours at the Habsburg era San Marco coffeehouse, where the cappuccinos are the world's best, Paula and I were still talking about the Poet, how his story informed what appeared to be a coming age of authoritarianism. Whatever mixed feelings we had about the so-called John the Baptist of Fascism we figured we owed him a gesture of thanks. He had made us think, which for us was life's great reward.

Conveniently enough there was a statue of the Poet in Borsa Square, only a few blocks from our Trieste hotel. In 2019, when the statue of the Poet was first unveiled, there was a controversy. Yes, people agreed, D'Annunzio was a great Italian writer, perhaps the greatest since Dante, but then there was the other side, that duplicitous soul that The Poet wrote "takes pleasure in dark things."

The statue in Borsa Square depicts the Poet in his literary mode, sitting on a bench reading a book. It is a very realistic statue; in fact, when we first walked by it in a driving rain, we thought it was an old, bald man so engrossed in his book that he didn't know he was getting wet. Now, however, the bronze Poet had company. There were a half dozen boys in their older teens hanging around. Asked if they knew who D'Annunzio was, they assured us they did. He was the Poet, they told us boisterously. The Poet and the "el capo segreto," the secret leader. They liked him, his ideas, his books. Someday they'd read them all. He was bold, like they wanted to be.

After the boys left, Paula and I sat on the bench next to D'Annunzio. Who was he, really, an artist, a warrior or was it impossible for him to separate the two? That's what we wanted to know. But The Poet never said a word, he just sat there in the rain, reading his book.