Gabriele D’Annunzio

The aidoiomaniac D’Annunzio
An Intellectual More than a Playboy

Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863 -1938), also known as “il Vate” (the prophet), was an Italian writer, poet, politician and journalist, who coming from a middle class family became a symbol of the Italian Decadence and famous for his compositions as well as for his particular sexual habits.
“Porco alato e geniale” (Pig winged and genius), he described himself, while biographers addressed him as “Genius and recklessness“.  Among the aspects of the writer’s Decadence, there is aestheticism art, or art conceived as Beauty which must be above all; the practical aestheticism, according to which also the life must be realized in absolute freedom, outside and above every law and moral restraint; the panismo which is the tendency to surrender to the life of the senses and instincts, and finally the man as “superman“, the ruler of a world beyond good and evil, where instinct is the only truth because morality is a lie, and where the man that resembles the beast then outdoes man, beyond human becoming hero, while getting rid of the ethics that prohibits lust, he can dare everything that gives pleasure. A description, this, that is very close to the aberrant “Superman” concept conceived by Nietzsche.

Already in his youth, d’Annunzio showed an ambitious and uninhibited character and, in fact, at sixteen already had his first sexual experience. In Florence, during a school trip, he evaded janitor’s surveillance and with a gold wristwatch, a gift of his grandfather, paid a prostitute with whom he wished to have sex.
In 1881 he moved to Rome to continue his studies at the university, where,  trying to reach fame and glory, attended worldly circles of Roman salons, beginning to appreciate the sumptuous and scandalous lives of the rich bourgeoisie, through adventures and love stories. His exceptional sexuality blew and he will earn in emotions and sex delights, even if this entailed moral values violation. According to some biographers, his actual mistresses were hundred and fifty. Half a thousand for some, and even four thousand according to others, with the inevitable cocaine snorting.

As the biographers say, this “sex superman” really did not love all those women, except perhaps, a little bit, Maria Hardouin and Eleonora Duse. Maria Hardouin was the daughter of Giulio, Duke of Gallese, who d’Annunzio married at 20 years in 1883, probably for reasons of interest and because of noble rank. They had met a few years earlier and a love at first sight, but even though a minor, during a walk the lecherous man took her to a grove, on the outskirts of Rome, and deflowered her. Among the collection of poems “Intermezzo di rime” also is included “Peccato di maggio“, in which the writer described in detail what happened in the woods. The young Duchess soon became pregnant, raising a scandal. The Duke Giulio, furious, vetoed the marriage and denounced d’Annunzio for corruption of minors, despite his wife, Mary’s mother, called for a shotgun wedding. In response, the two lovers fled together and got married in a hurry, but without the consent of the duke, who did not want to see anymore both his daughter and the son-in-law.

A marriage that will last long but unfortunate for the young lady, also if from their union were born three children. “My dear Gabriele was a husband physically incapable of being faithful,” the Duchess bitterly confessed later, when after the third child will separate from him. In fact, the new series of post-marriage lovers began immediately with the journalist Olga Roman Ossani, then followed by Elvira Natalia Fraternali, estranged wife of Count Ercole Leoni, although in the meantime the writer were not shirking to his conjugal “duty”. Hard days for Elvira because meantime the “supreme Vate”  had already set his sights on the Sicilian Princess Maria Gravina Cruyllas Ramacca, which he called a “erotic nymphomaniac”. A good match! In a tormented relationship lasted three years, the Sicilian princess gave birth to two children, Ariel’s sons (the personal nickname of the poet), who legitimated only the first child. It was 1895 when he began his relationship with the famous actress Eleonora Duse, who was in search of a true love and believed to have found it by Ariel. And the illusion of love will cost her dearly, and not just for the money that the loved boyfriend snatched her by deception, but because while she was sacrifying her prestige, exposing herself to the audience boos, he already was enjoying with a new paramour, the young actress Juliet Gordigiani. Actress, young and beautiful, but poor and this was not good for him that needed rich women. “I forgive him to have abused of myself, ruined and humiliated me. I forgive everything because I loved him”,  Duse said when left him definitively.

After a while, the tireless lover found another right woman, Alessandra Starabba Rudini, twenty-eight beautiful and rich, widow of the Marquis Carlotti.
His biographers say that in three years of living together, the great showman D’Annunzio got by the Marchesa Rudini amounts ten times higher than the one extorted to Duse in nine years. The last two years were very sad for the marquise because fell seriously ill, but meanwhile, the host had already a new mistress for giving vent to his inexhaustible lust, the Countess Josephine Mancini.
However, when he was no longer able to cope with the many creditors, decided it was time for a change of scenery and moved alone to Paris. The great seducer had already chosen the appropriate girlfriend to live and work peacefully in Paris, the Russian countess (French by adoption) Natalia de Goloubeff, 27, separated from her husband, who welcomed him at her home in Paris. The combination was perfect, he needed money and she sex.
“Fool of the blackest Slavic massacre,” he said about her, as she considered him “crazy for sex and beautiful women, virile and perfumed as few“. But, as soon as her financial resources were lost, due to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Ariel left her. During the last of the five years spent in Paris, he had some French sex playmates, as Marie de Regnier and Amélie Mazoyer, his housekeeper nicknamed Aelis (24 years less than the prophet), who followed him in Italy, when he returned in 1915 to become a soldier, enlisting as a volunteer during the First World War.
Besides devotion, one of Aelis’s quality that d’Annunzio appreciated more, especially with the passing of years, was a not common skill for fellatio, hence her nickname Aelis from helice, “helix” in French. “She has a beautiful mouth, in addition to the hand that gives oblivion,” Gabriele said of her.
During the conflict he lost partial vision in one eye, but as a man of theater, he participated more in the war performing on the stage, representing his true and false war actions, rather than by real.
In 1921, in Gardone, in the picturesque scenery of Lake Garda, d’Annunzio found the house of his dreams: a large villa of 36 rooms, which he titled the “Vittoriale of the Italians”.  After the restoration work, carried out with the financial support of Mussolini, he made it a national monument, donating it to the Italian State for paying his debts.
Mussolini also gave him what the bourgeois writer always had dreamed, proposing him for a nobiliar title, then conferred in 1924 by King Vittorio Emanuele III, letting he became the Prince of Montenevoso.

In spite of his advanced age, in those years other lovers followed, as the writer from Trieste Olga Levi Brunner,  the Venetian pianist Luisa Bàccara, and a certain Leila, all younger than him.
In that palace-mausoleum, the Prince of Montenevoso spent the last seventeen years of his mad and adventurous life, with profound suffering for his physical decline, often expressed by behavioral oddities and excessive frugality or sullenness, but always obsessed by sex, by frantic search of pleasure, eroticism and lust, and now even devoting more himself in masturbation, despite the age.
The last two women that remained close to him, were the faithful Aélis and Bàccara, forced to watch also to his bleak and dismal degradation, like satyr erotic rites that the seventy year old man organized from time to time. Gabriele d’Annunzio, the magician of perversion, among other things also invented the macabre eroticism, while lying naked in a coffin some prostitutes, also naked, kissed him from head to toe. Although nothing is written about, it is said that the teacher did not disdained others pervy sex affairs like pissing, shitting, and that maybe took away two ribs to better practice self-fellatio, all things truly uncommon for that era.
Gabriele d’Annunzio died at 75 years for a brain hemorrhage, and at his funeral, as well as Mussolini, attended his wife with three children, Amélie Mazoyer and Luisa Baccara, (Duse had died 14 years before). As he had decided, was buried in the small temple of the Holocaust, on top of the Vittoriale.

D’Annunzio was not handsome, neither rich, nor reliable, and for this arises the question, what did so many ladies, rich and beautiful, drive in his arms?!
Probably, the famous American dancer Isadora Duncan was right, saying about him, “a lover so great as to turn the most ordinary woman, and give her for a moment the appearance of a celestial being?”
The perverse lover designed by himself some clothes and then gave them to women, from time to time, to wear and represent the erotic scene that he had chosen. Clothes that transformed them in moths ready to burn devoutly wings to his flame. Only the sinuous and fatal painter Tamara de Lempicka was able to sneak out from the arms of the famous satyr.
In his house also special perfumes and incense were not lacking, as well as a well equipped wardrobe in which were found two hundred silk shirts, fifty hats  two hundred pairs among shoes and boots, three hundred pairs of socks, fifty silk pajamas and gowns, and boxes with vagina’s hairs that he kept in memory of his mistresses. Just “an animal of luxury” as he called himself.  “When D’Annunzio loves a woman, exalts and elevates the soul above the earth, to the divine regions where moves and shines Dante’s Beatrice. From time to time, he let women participate in the divine essence and leads so high as to cause them to imagine they are really on the same level of Beatrice… there was a time in Paris, where the cult of D’Annunzio touched dizzying heights and they were all famous beauties to love him. But when the whim of the poet ended, he abandoned his mistress on duty for another“, so Mrs. Duncan wrote in her memoirs, who had with d’Annunzio an intense but short relationship.
In fact, it was always him to tire of the most beautiful and passionate women.
His only fault, if it can be defined so, was the bad habit of wasting considerable wealth for voluptuous things, and for this he is often found in bad waters and full of debt,  for which in 1910, there will seizure and sale of his goods.

The women he met, young and old, were all at his feet, happy to be desired by the most famous “tombeur de femmes” of Italian literature, ready to give herself to him body and soul, and that in addition to opening their legs, also opened their bags to pay his debts.
If it is not for wellness or charm, then why that? This is a good reason to suppose that D’Annunzio was a gifted, moreover, in an old Italian porno film, during the pioneer and illegal pornography period, among other collaborators in the captions is also read the name of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Of course, besides the use of the word, he knew how to use his sexual organ that he called “gonfalon selvaggio” (wild flag), and his exceptional libido led him to have, evidently, sexual performance record, or more intercourse without long breaks, and not for nothing that he was labeled “thirsty for sex“, all things that, alas, ravish many women.

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