D'Annunzio was an obsessive lover: an elegy to his mistress written in the Tivoli gardens exists in manuscripts dated an hour apart, and his erotic writing, which he compared to the Renaissance pornographer Pietro Aretino, is bluntly sensual. Women's armpits, the intricacy of their genitals, the hairs on their legs, are greedily conjured up, but D'Annunzio shied from his desires even as he pursued them. He found something disturbingly putrid at the heart of his adored female flesh and came to prefer the "cleanness" of his friendships with young aviators. 

It was on the Western Front in France during the First World War that D'Annunzio claimed to have seen dead soldiers tied to stakes in bundles of ten. For him, this evoked the fascio, a Roman symbol that would become omnipresent in Italy between the wars. D'Annunzio convinced himself that only by a sublime blood sacrifice could Italy be reborn as a great nation. Unlike his fellow literati, such as Pirandello, he refused to fully endorse Benito Mussolini, the former socialist who, following D'Annunzio's example, transformed himself from hack journalist to strutting dictator. But the techniques of political theatre D'Annunzio created to propound his vision to such horrific effect were so thoroughly absorbed by Mussolini that the deposed Duce of Fiume became the victim "of the greatest act of plagiarism ever seen". Fascism owed everything to D'Annunzio, but the exercise of power itself bored and disgusted him.

At the end of his life, closeted in his folly on Lake Garda and addicted to cocaine, D'Annunzio wrote of the "horror" of his fame. Lucy Hughes-Hallett has choreographed this compelling, macabre life with D'Annunzian sprezzatura in a scholarly distillation as potent and elegantly balanced as the poet's personal recipe for cologne.