THE PRINCE OF MONTENEVOSO

D’Annunzio was more than a poet, a writer or a playwright; he was also a politician. It was in that capacity, with a group of legionaries, that he entered Rijeka in 1919. He called it “the city of life”, declared its independence and founded the Charter of Carnaro. “One of the most modern constitutions of the twentieth century,” says Giordano Bruno Guerri, “which is still topical even today; D’Annunzio imagined an ideal city where beauty, music and liberty reign.” This special programme presents a little-known political D’Annunzio, an intellectual who became active but did not neglect being a poet, aesthete, ideal lover, star of the twentieth century and marketing man before the term was even invented (in order to sell his second poetry collection, he spread the word that he had died falling from a horse). After Rijeka he returned to Italy to what was to be the “Vittoriale of the Italians”, full of his life with pictures, kitsch art, dandy clothes, and relics of love but also of literature.

A Maremosso production exclusively for Sky Arte HD, which broadcasted it in 2013, on the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Gabriele D’Annunzio.