Volume 25, Number 10 · June 15, 1978
The Bad Tooth
By Luigi Barzini
The First Duce: D'Annunzio at Fiume
by Michael A. Ledeen
Johns Hopkins University Press, 225 pp., $13.50
In 1919-1920 Gabriele d'Annunzio occupied the Adriatic port of Fiume—now the Yugoslav city Rijeka—for twenty months. It is easy and tempting now to dismiss this episode as meaningless buffoonery, a grotesque Italian operatic demonstration, a hysterical and almost bloodless heroic-comic show staged by a demented Art Nouveau poet, one more sign of the perennial impotence of Italian governments. Michael Ledeen, a perceptive young American historian who knows more about modern Italian history than all living Italian historians with the exception of two (Rosario Romeo and Renzo de Felice), has a different view. He considers the Fiume adventure the harbinger of things to come. He sees in it the sinister seeds of other, more catastrophic left-wing and right-wing mass movements, based mainly on primitive emotions whipped up by a magnetic man haranguing crowds from a balcony and staging mass spectacles. The city under d'Annunzio, he writes, 'was a highly revealing and suggestive model for much of the West today, a microcosm of the modern political world.'
Review, 1800 words
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