A chi la morte A noi!

“A chi la morte? A noi!” is a call-and-response through which Gabriele D’Annunzio turns a question about readiness to die into a collective answer. At a funeral in Fiume, the crowd’s response makes shared words into a public performance of allegiance, while the novice aviator Amerigo Dumini takes note.

The exchange at the funeral

The words come as the ceremony moves from formal address toward direct engagement with the crowd. D’Annunzio has just instructed his pilots to cloak the two coffins, then addresses the people of Fiume and the council as the dead are entrusted to the earth. The scene is no longer only a speech delivered to listeners: the piazza answers the speaker through both words and actions, and the narration describes the streets as a theater in which the city has come to watch itself.

D’Annunzio calls out, “A chi la morte?” The crowd replies, “A noi!” The question and answer are brief, but their arrangement matters: the first voice names death, and the many-voiced response accepts its claim on the group. The exchange gives the assembled people a role in the ceremony rather than leaving them as spectators. The book presents the response as a huge roar echoing the poet’s call.

Meaning and function

The expression works as a ritual affirmation, not as an explanation of individual motives. Its force comes from the public sequence: a leader poses the question, a gathered crowd answers in unison, and the response becomes audible evidence of collective belonging. The exchange binds the funeral’s mourning to a language of readiness and commitment, without specifying what any individual will do afterward.

That transformation is especially significant in a scene where the dead are being consigned to the earth. The call does not remove the ceremony’s grief; instead, it places the crowd’s answer alongside the burial and gives death a political and communal frame. The phrase’s memorable structure—question followed by answer—makes that frame easy to repeat and recognize.

Witness and wider pattern

Amerigo Dumini, identified at this point as a novice aviator, takes note of the exchange. His brief act of attention links the public ritual to a figure who will matter elsewhere in the narrative, though this moment alone does not state what he makes of the words or how they affect his later actions.

The episode belongs to a wider pattern in which public gatherings, memorial objects, and funeral rites make political feeling visible. At a Milan demonstration, opposing processions are distinguished by their flags, songs, and different proximity to wartime killing; Gabriele D’Annunzio elsewhere makes a fallen soldier’s flag a symbol of national grievance; and the Unknown Soldier’s burial turns an unidentified body into a collective object of remembrance. These scenes do not repeat the Fiume exchange, but they share its concern with how public ritual gathers people around death and gives their presence a political meaning.