Remembering Il Vate

One of my earliest memories of flight. As a young boy at the historic Ward’s Kiddie Park in Coney Island, I was endlessly drawn to the little fighter planes. My parents often recalled that I preferred this ride to almost any other. In my imagination, I was a great flying ace, soaring above the clouds in pursuit of the coveted Pour le Mérite—the legendary “Blue Max”

As a boy, I was fascinated by war and the great flying aces of the First World War, particularly the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, René Fonck, and Fulco Ruffo di Calabria. Yet few figures stirred my imagination more than Gabriele D’Annunzio, the legendary Il Vate. Long before I read his works or understood the complexities of his life, I was captivated by his audacity, aesthetic vision, and martial spirit. To my youthful imagination, he seemed to embody the rare union of the poet and the warrior.

Postage stamp from the Regency of Fiume
featuring Gabriele D’Annunzio. Issued in
1920 during his occupation of the city,
it stands as a small but evocative relic of
one of the most remarkable episodes of
twentieth-century Italian history.

Today, my admiration for D’Annunzio extends beyond the man of action to the symbolic world he created. As the foremost voice of Italian decadentismo, he embraced estetismo, the conviction that beauty stands among life’s highest ideals, while his engagement with Nietzsche inspired superomismo, an ideal of heroic self-fashioning and the cultivation of exceptional character. He rejected the complacency of bourgeois life, aspiring instead to shape his own existence into a work of art.

To me, Il Vate remains a powerful reminder that literature can speak not only to the intellect, but also to the archetypal depths of the human psyche.

For that reason, I continue to return to D’Annunzio’s corpus. He was among the first writers to awaken in me a sense that literature could aspire to something greater than entertainment or instruction. At its highest, it can become an encounter with beauty, symbol, memory, and the enduring mysteries of the human spirit.

~ By Giovanni di Napoli, September 8th, Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary