/lit/ - Literature

>From today on your Italy is a lively and active realization of what used to be a lyrical prophecy, an all-too-far-reaching hope. Your Italy 'makes of all the oceans' one single Ocean that is praised by a single name: heroic Ocean. Its only borders are those of the entire world, those of the Italian potency and will.
A quote from the last letter that D'Annunzio wrote to Mussolini before he died, in 1938. I saw it quoted in a paper on D'Annunzio when I was doing some research and I keep thinking about it now. Something about the older man praising the younger so poetically and so unreservedly in his final letter feels like him bequeathing Italy to Mussolini and reconciling the rivalry that the two of them had-- the supreme arrogance (positive, affectionate) of bequeathing Italy to the man who actually ruled it I feel is very like D'Annunzio

I also read an article during the same stint of research by a liberal noble that was calling D'Annunzio a fascist (he was, in my estimation, but that means something different from what the noble meant) and denigrating him and Mussolini-- the article was published two months after D'Annunzio died, in English. I don't even want to say his name because after reading his "obituary" and that snippet of D'Annunzio's letter I feel that both D'Annunzio and Mussolini were each individually a thousand times the man that that pompous, spiritual bug of an aristocrat was