Poignantly, the heroine of Pleasure is first viewed from below and behind as she mounts the steps to a palazzo, the perspective of the narrator underlining his inferior status. Rather than seeking, Proust-like, a passport to her rarefied sphere, D'Annunzio recognized the potential of converting his own popularity into power. This way of "doing politics", in the words of the historian Emilio Gentile, is now universally accepted in our celebrity-obsessed age.

Much of the power of D'Annunzio's work derives from the tension between archaism and modernity. Here was a Futurist avant la lettre, who could describe the beauty of machine guns in a medieval idiom long before his disciple Marinetti published the manifesto in 1909 that launched the movement. Hughes-Hallett is alert to the presence of the Abruzzi, D'Annunzio's homeland between the Apennines and the Adriatic, in his work; its wild landscape and vivid colours haunt his writing. It remains one of Italy's most remote provinces, where in D'Annunzio's day Christianity still co-existed with a fanatical paganism, and this mystical heritage informed the meditations on religious ecstasy and mob power which characterise his early stories, and contributed to the hypnotic liturgy of his later oratory.

Having sent notice of his own death to a Florentine newspaper to whip up a little sentimental publicity for his first volume of poetry Primo Vere, published in 1879 when he was 16, D'Annunzio set off to conquer Rome. Thirty-five years later he was exhorting a riotous populace to overthrow their government and enter the war. His trajectory — from jobbing hack to bestselling writer, from war hero to rebel leader (or "Duce") of Fiume, the "City of the Holocaust" on the Dalmatian coast which he governed for 15 months in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles — is charted with the swift satisfaction of a Futurist bullet. 

His love life was equally anarchic. After eloping with a duchess, who bore him three children before attempting suicide, he was prosecuted for adultery with a Neapolitan princess. Thereafter D'Annunzio worked his way through hundreds of women. The love of his life, he decided, was Eleanora Duse, a great actress whom contemporaries considered the only rival to Sarah Bernhardt. For "La Duse" he wrote plays which required her to be, respectively, blind, mutilated, mad and murdered. (The role in Jorio's Daughter, where the heroine is burnt alive, went to someone else.)