ITALY: Poet's Funeral

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Fiume. After the War only a crazy man or a genius would have thought of attempting to seize the Austrian port of Fiume with a few hundred Italian stalwarts, defying the Paris Peace Conference and high-minded Woodrow Wilson, who was at the zenith of his efforts to end seizures by force. For 15 months D'Annunzio ruled Fiume as its fantastic Dictator, among other things granted himself by decree a divorce he had been vainly trying to get for years. The Dictator of Fiume even issued a proclamation "declaring war on Italy," but delighted Italians knew it was his way of helping Rome tell President Wilson they were "powerless" to control this great Italian patriot. Eventually D'Annunzio, after an Italian warship had duly popped a few projectiles into Fiume, surrendered it to his native country and strutted home to be created a Prince, almost suffocated with adulation.

Peace. So many European beauties of all ages now clamored for his attention that D'Annunzio contrived a semi-monastic villa on Lake Garda where for years things have been made exciting but not too easy for his guests, male or female. The guestroom drawers brimmed with the finest silken lingerie in Europe, but the Genius, who was now well beyond three score, would often simply talk romantically all night.

Fascism. Naturally D'Annunzio was a Fascist—indeed he considered himself Fascist No. 1, having been Dictator (even though only in Fiume) before Mussolini Il Duce from the first saw that the Poet-Prince could never be a serious rival, encouraged him to burst forth on all occasions with poetic Fascism at its most passionate heat, loaded him with honors and finally last year made D'Annunzio President of the Royal Italian Academy (TIME, Oct. 4).

Splash. Soon presses in Rome, Paris, London and Manhattan will pour out selections from D'Annunzio's "thousands of love letters," for his will characteristically provides that, now he is dead, they are to be published at once to make the biggest possible splash.