Ever Heard of Gabriele d’Annunzio?

The Italian poet who, 100 years ago, airdropped "his own propagandistic poetry over Vienna, marched into the Hapsburg city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) and declared himself its leader" is the subject of an essay by Tara Isabella Burton published in the opinion pages of the New York Times. Burton explains that, at the time, "Fiume’s postwar status had been in dispute for months." Reading on from there: 

Both the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) claimed the city, which was majority Italian but had a sizable Croatian population. For Italian nationalists, Fiume was part of the “irredenti,” or unredeemed, territories: Italian lands waiting to be claimed by Italians.

Enter d’Annunzio. The 56-year-old novelist and poet had already made a name for himself not just as one of Italy’s greatest writers, but also one of its most flamboyant. As a young man he’d earned spare cash writing celebrity gossip columns; in his prime, he used them to cultivate myths about his own history. (For example, in 1911, when the Mona Lisa was briefly stolen from the Louvre, he heavily implied it was at his house.) He spent beyond his means, leaving his wife and children destitute while he collected horses and objets d’art (and cocaine). He had hundreds of love affairs — and would tip off journalists when he was about to break one of them off, in the hope that the subsequent scene would make the tabloids. He lived by the maxim of one of his most famous characters, Andrea Sperelli: “One must make one’s life into a work of art.”

Learn more at NYT.