“The Madonna del Santo Venerdì… inspires in me this greeting to Mila, who lives again from the ashes of the pyre and is once more made flesh in you. The Madonna del Santo Venerdì wears today the veiled face of my most beautiful melancholy. The bells of my rustic campanile have been gagged. The silence of my olive trees is so sorrowful that it seems to be listening to the divine anguish from which the sweat of blood pours down. From time to time some word of the wretched mother who tells the hour of the passion returns to my spirit, and some word of Mila who accuses herself before the righteous people; and the last voice of Ornella who promises paradise to the accursed woman.”
Where on earth had that sheet of paper come from?
Newly exiled at the Vittoriale, D’Annunzio had sent that open letter to the actress Vera Vergani, who played Mila in the Figlia di Iorio, his masterpiece, revived at the Argentina eighteen years after its debut, on 15 April of that year 1922.
Dario Niccodemi, the director of the company, had read it to the audience during the interval between the second and third acts.
The tone was full of regret and nostalgia: in it the poet evoked the places where the work had been composed and did not hide his mood in those months that preceded the march on Rome.
“I have forgotten all the rest. But today there flows back into my heart the longing for the places where the work was built, and that breathless happiness that accompanied the song sprung from a source deeper than my own soul, welling up from the perennial veins of all my people… Tomorrow night, in the night between the Saturday of the Resurrection and the Sunday of the great Easter, I should like to find myself again on the shore of Nettuno; I should like to walk alone, in a dream, behind the black and white flock, and to ford the Loricino again, and to gaze once more at the mountains of Cori stripped bare by the glimmer of the waning moon, and to hear again within me the faithful sadness of my lineage… Blessed Aligi, who could sleep for seven hundred years and remember his cradle no more…”
In those same Easter days of 1922 D’Annunzio wrote as follows in a letter to Duse, inviting her to join him on Lake Garda: “I have a motorcar for the journey. I offer this with much trembling, as you know. And I neither hope nor despair. Do what your heart tells you. Know that I have for you, Ghisola and Eleonora, a feeling that has grown higher and vaster in memory and over the years; and that I am a poor man.”
Their love story, begun in 1894, had ended abruptly in 1904, and since then they had not seen each other again.
He would meet her for the last time in Milan in August of that same 1922 and, after the mysterious fall from the window of the Vittoriale, on 19 September he would write her the following telegram: “Gabri awaits from Ghisola the word of resurrection. The sketches for the scenes arrived yesterday, made according to my instructions. I do not know whether I should send them to Milan and then see to their execution. I dare not hope for a Franciscan visit to hell. I shall try by every means to come myself.”
Eighteen days after the harsh letter D’Annunzio addressed to Mussolini on 9 January 1923, and a few months short of his sixtieth birthday, Ernest Hemingway declared, in the “Toronto Daily Star” of 27 January: “He may last fifteen years, or he may be overthrown next spring by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who hates him… A new opposition will arise, indeed it is already forming, and it will be led by that old and bald braggart, perhaps a little mad, but profoundly sincere and divinely courageous, who is Gabriele D’Annunzio.”
The following year, on 10 June 1924, the Matteotti murder would take place, but one must wait for the publication of the first volume of the Faville del maglio to find, in a letter from the Vate to a legionary, as reported by the honourable Tito Zaniboni, the following resentful expression: “I am very sad at this fetid ruin.”
That very year, less than two months earlier, on 21 April, an Easter Monday, Duse had died in Pittsburgh, and D’Annunzio, distraught, would dedicate to her the memorable pages of the first volume of the Faville , where he presents her as the consoler “of the time of the intoxication of Alcyone.”
Perhaps, as he wrote those pages, his thoughts turned to those days of the summer of 1903 when, after turning forty at “Settignano di Desiderio” and after writing for the occasion the sparkling pages of the Esequie di giovinezza, he had gone to take refuge in the Villa Borghese at Nettuno.
Duse had joined him and was there with him.
They rode along the shore. The fluttering veil that Eleonora wore around her head and let stream loose behind her like a wing, and his own eccentric way of dressing and of riding, often provoked ironic comments. They were rides beyond the artillery firing range, through the scrub, on the road to Torre Astura, where the poet and the divine one went to enjoy the sunset and to seek inspiration.
Everything came back to mind from that time: the balcony of the villa that overlooked the pine wood and the sea, the study in an attic, the window from which he gazed out over the infinite expanse of the waters. There he worked for a good part of the night.

In a letter written to Duse on 17 July 1904, on the anniversary of the beginning of the Figlia di Iorio, D’Annunzio told her of a time when, awaiting her return, after buying a little toy theatre for his daughter Renata, he had composed for the occasion a little play that he still knew by heart: “La sirenetta: È venuta di lontano / una dolce creatura / che ha per nome Bellamano / e ci porta la ventura. Il coro: Chi sarà? Chi mai sarà? La sirenetta: Di lontano è a noi venuta. / Ah con noi fosse per sempre! / L’hanno già riconosciuta / le rosette di settembre. Il coro: Chi sarà? Chi mai sarà? La sirenetta: La conosce l’acqua chiara, / la conosce la mortella, / e anche quella che si parte / nerazzurra rondinella. Il coro: La signora! La signora! / Benvenuta la signora! / Ora e sempre, sempre e ora, / benvenuta la signora!”
Everything recalled that distant time.
Already in June he had turned to Annibale Tenneroni, asking him to urge Augusto Sindici, for whose XIV Leggende he had written the preface in 1900, to give him some indication about the possibility of finding a solitary and quiet villa: “I have sought in vain a refuge on the shore of Rimini. Now I should very much like to spend the summer on the Neronian shore.”
In a letter to Giuseppe Treves of 5 July 1903 he wrote: “I shall leave tomorrow for Nettuno […] I have seen Cicciuzza with great emotion… I hope to be able to take her with me to the sea and to hear her melodious voice among the holm oaks of the old villa.”
Then to Giovanni Pascoli, on 16 July 1903: “I am here, before the Neronian sea, within sight of the Circeo promontory; and I begin to work again. Today is for me a day of great purity; I have here on the table the good paper on which I am about to write the first lines of a pastoral tragedy.”
And again to Adolfo de Carolis, on 17 July: “I write to you in haste. In a little while I shall mount my horse to ride to the wood of Astura. The countryside is divine, and from the Borghese terrace one discovers the immense sea. The doge’s horn of the Circeo is there, in the clear sky. I hope you will come to see me. I shall set to work tomorrow.”
On 31 August, moreover, he would confide to Michetti: “Dear Ciccillo, these summer weeks will remain memorable for me. I had never worked with such violence, and I had never felt my spirit in such strong communion with the earth.”
Finally, in a letter to Benigno Palmerio of 3 September 1903, he would declare: “Dear Benigno. I confess that I have not opened your letters, knowing them to be full of annoyances. Last Saturday, at sunset, I finished La figlia di Iorio, which seems to me the highest work I have composed thus far, profound and simple. In writing it, I felt my roots in my native land. Now I have taken up my work again to complete the few things still missing from the volume of the Laudi.”
Thus were born the Sogni di terre lontane.
With imaginative flight and nostalgia the poet evoked in each lyric one of the “distant lands” where September was sweet: his native pastoral Abruzzo, the Roman baths of Diocletian, the Loricino, the little Latian river mentioned by Livy that flows into the sea near Nettuno, passing through the estate of Augusto Sindici, the spring of Juturna, at the foot of the Palatine, Capodistria, flower of the Adriatic, the misty Lombard plain, the remote eastern sea.
Of those “dreams” he would surely remember two years later, in 1905, in the discourse prefaced to Più che l’amore: “‘You are perhaps my last distant land,’ he says to the woman who calls to him and rouses him. The rivers, the mountains, the forests, the deserts, all the unknown and longed-for homelands seem to sink into his spirit and turn into inner regions. Other paths, other cultures, other dominions, other cities he recognizes within himself or glimpses. Transformed into mystical space, the perilous continent is within him, girded by the waves ‘without foam and without clamour’ of the immense Melancholy…”
With that sheet of paper before me, I reflected.
I thought of D’Annunzio and at the same time I thought of myself.
I realized that through him I had carried out a reading of myself.
I compared my own fortieth year, when I had written the D’Annunzian essay entitled L’usignolo d’Orfeo, with D’Annunzio’s fortieth year when, in that same Tyrrhenian setting, he had written La figlia di Iorio.
La figlia di Iorio and the tale of Sleeping Beauty.
In that essay the reference to the tale of Sleeping Beauty proves highly significant for D’Annunzio.
In the ballads of the Isaotta Guttadauro it is the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty that, in the refusal opposed to the lord’s offers, whereby she is restored to her sleep, becomes an image of the poet’s soul: “Altre plaghe ho regnate. / Eranmi schiavi gli astri in lunghe torme; / e in tal regno le feste ho celebrate / de’ suoni de’ colori e de le forme”.
It is no accident that those verses are then quoted in the dedicatory letter of the Trionfo della morte and again, with regard to Stelio Effrena, in the Fuoco: “Alluding to me, Francesco de Lizio lamented that an artist so magnificently sensual should be compelled to celebrate the feasts ‘of sounds, of colours and of forms’ in the palace of his solitary dreams.”
But where the reference to the tale of Sleeping Beauty proves most evident is in the chapter of the Piacere that describes Andrea’s convalescence, if one bears in mind the passage from Amiel’s Journal intime that D’Annunzio takes up: “J’éprouve comme la paix indéfinissable de l’anéantissement et de la quiétitude vague du Nirvâna; je sens devant moi et en moi passer le fleuve radie du temps, glisser les ombres impampables de la vie, et je le sens avec la tranquillité cataleptique de la Belle au bois dormant.”
And the three sisters in the Vergini delle rocce are the Sleeping Beauties in the woods toward whom the protagonist rides, and they recall the infancy, boyhood and adolescence of Prince Charming, kept intact like three little Sleeping Beauties in the mother, according to what is written in Esequie di giovinezza: “My infancy, my boyhood, my adolescence have remained intact like three little Sleeping Beauties beneath the old roof, among the old motionless things. When I arrive, at too long intervals, all three awaken, and it seems to me that each says to me the same words that the Princess said to the gracious Prince: ‘Ah, how you have kept me waiting!’. And we are betrothed. And each begins again to live and to smile, in the life and in the smile of my mother.”
Already foreshadowed in the refrain sung by Ornella (“Tutta di verde mi voglio vestire, / tutta di verde per santo Giovanni, / ché in mezzo al verde mi venne a fedire…”) in the Figlia di Iorio is, finally, the most explicit reference to the tale of Sleeping Beauty: “Vuoi dormir settecent’anni / con la bella sonnacchiosa?”.
“Madre, madre, dormii settecent’anni, / settecent’anni; e vengo di lontano. / Non mi ricordo più della mia culla” are the words of Aligi to his mother on the eve of his meeting with Mila, and the mother repeats them in a desperate cry at the conclusion of the tragedy, before the parricide, come to seek pardon, receives the cup of the consòlo from the one who alone can offer it to him, from her from whose womb he came, and exclaims: “mozzatemi entrambe le mani, / nel sacco di cuoio cucitemi /… / e gittatemi nella fiumana / ch’io vi dorma settecent’anni / ch’io dorma sott’acqua, nel gorgo / profondo, ancòra settecent’anni / e più non mi ricordi che il giorno / di Dio ha illuminato quegli occhi”.
The sleep of the shepherd Aligi, which recalls the mythical sleep of the shepherd Endymion, is “like in fairy tales, in which the whole world stops, the castle, the birds on the branches, the servants, the cooks plucking the fowl, until the day of liberation comes,” writes Lella Ravasi Bellocchio in the essay Appunti di lettura del profondo su ‘La figlia di Iorio’, where she recalls a significant observation by Cesare Musatti: “My mother always used to tell me: do not end up like the shepherd Aligi.”

Where on earth had that sheet of paper come from?
From an old folder, a small cluster of notes, a sketch from many years ago, a few jottings for a planned tale.
It was the sketch of a tale: a writer who superimposes his own states of mind upon those imagined of his character.
Back then I had not been able to make use of them, but now I would surely have known what to do with them.
Someone has written that death is like the sun, one cannot look it in the face.
In his last letters to Titti, the last Clematide, D’Annunzio, in melancholy expectation of the ultimate visitor, wrote thus: “I shall pass away like all mortals.”
That tale of mine, which called me back to the memory of a distant time, might have provided me with a parapet that would allow me not to see it.
I felt from it a kind of posthumous joy.
I repeated the words of Italo Alighiero Chiusano’s introduction to the Usignolo di Orfeo: “And now here is Sabino Caronia presenting me with a ‘crayfish’ D’Annunzio, a D’Annunzio projected backward toward the mother, or toward the one who performs the mother’s function, that is, the sister, or even the wife; a D’Annunzio who, in the song of the nightingale to which the title alludes, expresses ‘the inconsolable grief for the loss of the prenatal bond,’ a D’Annunzio in whom the overbearing figure of the father as well, the threat of castration and ‘the identification of the sexual organ with an infected wound,’ and the theme of Persephone and of the Sleeping Beauty as well, are clear signals of a wish to ‘annul birth retroactively.’ Whence the all-too-famous phrase ‘Madre, madre, dormii settecent’anni’ now takes on a wholly different sound: no longer the languid sound of a decorative Liberty-style enervation, but a cry from the entrails, a tragic yearning of the puer now become a man to make himself puer aeternus, something possible only if there could ever come true the absurd (but perhaps hoped-for?) hypothesis of Nicodemus, in that conversation with Jesus that not by chance takes place in isolation and in nocturnal envelopment: ‘How can a man be born when he is old? Can he perhaps enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born again?’”
Everything was for me like a morning many years ago when, on the occasion of my birthday, shortly after reading that introduction to my book, with Diana I had gone from Terracina to the Circeo.
“Mind you, we shall never again be as young as we are today,” she had said to me.
And I looked at the temple of the Boy and meanwhile thought of D’Annunzio who, a few months after writing his Esequie di giovinezza, had come to the Villa Borghese at Nettuno.
I knew of the notes D’Annunzio took in February and March of 1897 for the projected fifth part of the Fuoco that would never be developed, and of which record survives only in the letter to George Herelle of 18 December 1899: “In the fifth part Rome, the performance of the theatre of Apollo, the victory, the catastrophe of the tram that unfolds among the three souls, the Neronian sea of Anzio, the Roman countryside, Astura and its Dantesque wood.”
I remembered those notes: “Mortella says: ‘It will be, if the flame lasts; it will not be, if the flame goes out.’ Then they light a heap of pine needles at the foot of a tree. The fire spreads with extraordinary speed. She gives herself, while both imagine around their supreme love the burning of the whole fragrant forest,” “They, having reached Nettuno by the way of the rocks, go to the tower of Astura by sea, on a sailing skiff. Mortella says: ‘No, no, not here. Over there, over there; on that distant point.’”
And I had read, in the volume by Luigi Francesco Cimmino, of another note on an outing to the Circeo in which Duse spoke of the novel then in gestation
So I, in my fortieth year, looking out from the height of the promontory, imagined the forty-year-old D’Annunzio who, having just celebrated his “esequie di giovinezza,” in the quiet of the Villa Borghese at Nettuno recalled that outing in the company of Duse, when he too, like me, from the height of the Circeo promontory, had looked out toward the temple of the Boy.
It was perhaps the savour of a distant joy, or merely the pleasure he took in repeating the sound of Virgil’s hexameters: “Juppiter Anxurus arvis praesidet.”
Le figure del tempo di già he would later have wished to title one of the most memorable Faville del maglio.
He felt the need to fix his memories
And yet he distrusted memory.
He said: “To recall is for me neither to have lived nor to relive, but to live within living.” And again: “To dare to pronounce judgment on Proust, to explain that art is very far from certain almost scientific treatises founded on fallacious memory.”
Life is lived in phases, as we know; life does not conclude.
Every existence is, ultimately, an interrupted project.
In the Libro segreto he would write: “Now that I know at last what the true essence of art is, now that I possess complete mastery, now that after fifty books I have learned how the book must be made, now I have only tomorrow’s evening in which to express myself, only tomorrow’s morning in which to sing and to delude myself that I am glad.”
And he warned his biographers: “Who, today or in this century or in the centuries to come, will ever be able to guess what of myself I have wished to hide?”
In mid-March 1933, on reaching his seventieth year, in a letter to Alfredo Felici he would enigmatically liken the Matteotti murder to the crime of that Corrado Brando who, in Più che l’amore declares: “I take upon myself all that is worst…”
What did he mean?
Who will ever be able to guess what of himself he wished to hide?

Sabino Caronia, literary critic and writer, a member of the Istituto di Studi Romani and of the Centro Studi G. G. Belli, editor of numerous profiles of contemporary Italian narrators, has published several volumes of critical essays as well as novels, short stories and poetry collections. He contributes to authoritative reviews and newspapers.