Gabriele D'Annunzio

Born in Pescara, D'Annunzio achieved fame as a poet while still a teenager and cultivated a flamboyant public persona of scandal, dueling, and love affairs that made him as much a celebrity as a writer across fin-de-siècle Italy.

The Child of Pleasure (1889), heavily indebted to Huysmans's À rebours, follows the aesthete Andrea Sperelli's pursuit of beauty and sensation through Roman high society, juggling two love affairs while a war wound slowly withers his will: Italian Decadence's founding novel, prose treated as ornament in itself.

He later reinvented himself as a nationalist war hero, leading the seizure of Fiume after the First World War in a private proto-fascist adventure that anticipated Mussolini's style of spectacle and rhetoric, before retiring to his lakeside villa, the Vittoriale, where he died in 1938.