Purple Magazine
— S/S 2013 issue 19
Gabriele d’Annunzio
Gabriele d’Annunzio: decadent poet, best-selling novelist, journalist-agitator, infamously demanding lover (of the likes of Sarah Bernhardt and her Italian rival, Eleanora Duse), and First World War air hero. He claimed to embody Nietzsche’s übermensch — an artist, eccentric genius, and leader of men.
The art director of Purple, Gianni Oprandi, was given free access to photograph d’Annunzio’s villa on the shores of the Gardone Riviera. This house and its garden were his final masterpiece, where he surrounded himself with books, artworks, mementos from his lovers, and some of his political and existential statements.
photography by GIANNI OPRANDI
photographer’s assistant FRANCESCO FRUGONI
A legend in his own time, Gabriele d’Annunzio constantly sought power and recognition. At the end of the First World War he tried to repatriate the town of Fiume, on the Croatian coast, a city-state that he ran briefly by dictatorial rule, popularizing the Roman salute, military parades, and balcony speeches that Mussolini would make famous. When the city was given back to Croatia, in 1921, he returned to his home on Lake Garda. In 1922 he mysteriously fell or was pushed from a window and afterward was given financial aid from Mussolini to enlarge his property — Il Vittoriale degli italiani (The Shrine of Italian Victories) — to keep him out of politics. Originally, the estate had been built for a German art historian, but it was confiscated by the Italian state, along with its contents, including Listz’s piano and a collection of rare books and artworks. D’Annunzio remained there — in splendor, attracting women from the world over and influencing both Futurism and Fascism (a movement he was actually against) — until his death in 1938. D’Annunzio expanded the estate; hauling up onto a hillside the torpedo-cruiser Puglia, which he used to patrol the Dalmatian coast; building a house for the airplane he flew in 1918 (having led a squadron of nine pilots 700 kilometers to drop propaganda leaflets on Vienna, the purpose of which was a call for the end of the Austro-Hungarian alliance with Prussia); and adding an amphitheater. D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale is now a mausoleum of decadent sensualist and self-inflating memorabilia, which also memorializes a historical moment when Italy was a world power for the first time since the Renaissance, 500 years earlier.
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Sculpture on the door of the Armless Office. The name comes from the sculpture of a left hand, cut and skinned, placed on the door frame with the motto “Recisa quiescit,” or “It lies still.”
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The amphitheater on Lake Garda.
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Columns with polychrome Murano glass pumpkins in the Music Hall.
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The Priory.
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The Lepers Room, a meditation room. The walls are upholstered with deer skins.
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A 16th-century wooden statue of Saint Sebastian in the Lepers Room.
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Little Apollo’s veranda. Plaster of archaic kouros decorated with blue eyes by the poet.
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Fountain in the Priory gardens.
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The Divine Comedy, illustrated by Amos Nattini (1927) in the Mappemonde Room.
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The Music Hall, with Lisio draperies.
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The Puglia warship.
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The Relics Room, where d’Annunzio collected images and symbols of different faiths: a pyramid of Eastern gods and idols below a row of Christian saints and martyrs in a kind of religious syncretism. Written in golden letters on the beam that runs along the walls: “All idols darken the living God. All faiths attest eternal man.” Purposefully placed before a tabernacle is the broken steering wheel of Sir Henry Segrave’s speedboat. Segrave died in 1930 during an attempt to overcome a speed record in the waters of Lake Windermere in England. D’Annunzio called that kind of driving the “religion of risk,” that is, the attempt of man to overcome the constraints imposed by nature.
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Francesco De Pinedo’s seaplane propeller suspended from the ceiling of the Dalmation Oratory. The seaplane made a flight of 55,000 kilometers from Sesto Calende to Melbourne and Tokyo in 1925. At the center of the room is a group of liturgical objects — boats, censers, aspergilla (sprinklers) — with strong symbolic value.
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Hermes of Praxiteles in the Relics Room.
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Antique Japanese theater mask from the 18th
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The Blue Bathroom: a rich collection of Persian-produced ceramic tiles on the walls, some of which date back to the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as Buccellati silver and Murano glass objects.
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Portrait of the famous Marquise Casati — one of d’Annunzio’s lovers and muses — by Man Ray, 1922, in the Poet’s Office.
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Photos from L’Officina of the actress Elena Sangro, who was one of the most important women in d’Annunzio’s life.
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Renato Brozzi’s large bronze tortoise in the Chelonia Room.
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Collar and photographs of d’Annunzio’s greyhounds.
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The poet’s dressing gown, with a customized hole for sexual activity.
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A 15th-century plaster of a crying monk from the tomb of Philippe Pot. The Via Crucis corridor walls are lined with materials produced in Milan by Lisio and Ferrari with the motto “Pax et bonum/malum et pax (peace and good/evil and peace).
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D’Annunzio’s brown calf shoes with orange-green phallic appliqués and fish-shaped incisions on the soles — one of the 300 pairs he designed for himself.
