Gabriele D’Annunzio’s seizure of Fiume began on September 11, 1919, as a rebellion by 187 grenadiers and volunteers led by an aging poet in a red sports car. It ended with the city occupied without a shot being fired, its people welcoming the column and its council entrusting D’Annunzio with civil and military power. The episode made a theatrical challenge to the Italian state into an accomplished political fact: a wager on a single charismatic leader that drew strength from veterans’ defiance, military defections, and the public’s response, but never secured the assent of Italy as a whole.

The Expedition’s Stakes

By September 1919, Fiume was controlled by an inter-Allied military garrison, while its future remained entangled in international decisions over the postwar settlement. The Allied forces included French, British, American, and Croatian contingents. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, intended the city to go to the Yugoslavs; Italian rulers, in the account of the episode, seemed prepared to accept that outcome. Against this stood Italian nationalists in Fiume and soldiers who regarded the city’s separation from Italy as intolerable. The grenadiers set out in defiance of the Italian high command, which opposed a coup, and of the authority of the inter-Allied command.

D’Annunzio’s own condition made the expedition’s scale especially stark. Fifty-six years old, feverish, and barely able to stand, he put on the uniform of a lieutenant colonel in the Novara Lancers. He had spent a long period recovering in Venice after a wartime plane crash left him blind in one eye. At the landing near his Venetian residence, a covered motorboat carried him across the lagoon; on the mainland, a flaming red Fiat Tipo 4 awaited. Its other passengers included a Sardinian Grenadier lieutenant and Guido Keller, a decorated airman whose eccentricity made him an unlikely-looking aide to an insurgent expedition. The contrast between the battered poet and the vivid car helped make the journey appear at once precarious and deliberately staged.

The Column and the Defections

The party reached Ronchi, near the border, shortly after sunset. Its co-conspirators were waiting, but the trucks requested by phonogram did not arrive as promised. For a time, the company had the appearance of a failed undertaking: D’Annunzio slept on a makeshift bed of nailed wooden planks, while Keller left with Tommaso Beltrami. Several hours later, about thirty surplus 15 Ter trucks appeared in the village square. The delay sharpened the gap between the expedition’s grand objective and its fragile means; the column that set off before dawn numbered only 187 rebels.

The grenadiers concealed their weapons and raised their capes to hide their insignia. They had been expelled from Fiume in late August after a clash with French soldiers, and were now returning on their own initiative, against military orders. Their cause rested not only on their own small force but on the expectation that volunteers from Fiume’s largely Italian civilian population would rise in support. The account casts their choice as an individual’s defiance of a formidable international order, while making clear how little material power the rebels initially possessed.

At Castelnuovo, four armored cars and a force of Bersaglieri were positioned to stop them. D’Annunzio parleyed with the Italian officials, and within minutes the armored cars were prepared to protect the very column they had been sent to halt. The Bersaglieri joined the rebels enthusiastically. On the road toward Fiume, the column stopped again so that officers could report to D’Annunzio, who addressed them from a small mound. Later, Lieutenant Colonel Raffaele Repetto, ordered to stop the march at any cost, rushed forward to embrace him instead. Arditi climbed onto the trucks, leaving no room for more passengers; as more joined along the way, the column had to crawl to avoid damaging its wheels. Each change of allegiance transformed the expedition’s prospects: the force that began as disobedient soldiers gathered strength from the state’s own military ranks.

The Border and the Occupation

At the border, General Pittaluga confronted D’Annunzio in person, accompanied by two colonels and armed men. Pittaluga ordered him to turn back, accused him of setting himself above state authority and ruining Italy, and challenged his belief that he could act as if omnipotent. D’Annunzio answered not with a military advantage but with a symbolic gesture: opening his coat to expose his medals, he imitated Napoleon’s offer of his chest to the troops sent to stop him. The scene made the confrontation a contest over the meaning of service and authority as much as a test of force. Pittaluga, himself captivated by the medal’s blue ribbon and the appeal of the rebel soldier, invoked his Garibaldi-following father and grandfather. The barrier was then shattered, and the column passed into Fiume.

The rebels entered shortly after eleven in the morning. The city’s population welcomed them with intense jubilation; women in their finest clothes greeted the liberators, while laurel leaves fell from rooftops. The entry was bloodless. D’Annunzio went directly to the Hotel Europa and slept, exhausted. The episode’s reversal is central to its drama: a venture that had begun with delayed transport, hidden insignia, and a tiny following arrived not as a battle-worn conquest but as a public celebration. Fiume’s reception gave the seizure a popular image, although it did not settle the city’s disputed international status or establish that all Italians supported D’Annunzio’s action.

Power, Proclamation, and Limits

While D’Annunzio slept, Keller proposed that the city council grant the poet full civil and military powers. The council president, Antonio Grossich, had initially received Keller with wariness, but the council agreed to entrust the administration of the contested city to D’Annunzio. The decision converted the column’s military success into authority inside Fiume. It also placed a man known for his poetic and political theatricality in charge of practical government.

The next morning, D’Annunzio wrote to Pittaluga that he had to assume military command of Italian Fiume to ensure order. With no answer from Rome to the challenge posed by the march, he took power. His first measure was to close the brothels temporarily, seeking to prevent clashes between the Fiume Legionnaires and French troops. The order was presented as a personal renunciation as well as an act of administration: the Commander would deprive himself of a pleasure he had treated as indispensable in order to set an example. The aesthete’s flags, flowers, and chocolates remained, but the lawmaker had entered the scene.

Four months after his vow at the Campidoglio, D’Annunzio addressed Fiume’s population directly and proclaimed the city’s annexation to Italy. The crowd answered with a repeated yes, and the members of the City Council approached to kiss him. The public was not simply watching a political performance; it was summoned into it as a participant. Yet the book places that triumph beside the limits of D’Annunzio’s national claim. In January 1920, he described the preceding year as one defined by Fiume and passion, in opposition to the exhausted politics represented by Versailles. He chose to remain in Fiume, which he called the place where the soul was freer, even against the wishes of the Fiumani. The narrative then undercuts the spectacle: Italians had not followed him, and the poet’s authority did not amount to national consent.

The episode’s larger significance lies in how it joins military disobedience to political ritual. A small column becomes a larger one through defections; a border barrier gives way beneath a performance of heroic memory; and the city’s welcome becomes a public affirmation of the new ruler. The book sets this spectacle within a postwar Europe of mass bereavement and millions of returning soldiers, where inherited political authority seemed exhausted and a new alignment appeared imminent. Later fascist rhetoric likewise presents national unity as something to be forged from regional divisions and collective action, while its crowds and ceremonies give political belonging a visible, almost religious form. Fiume therefore appears both as a real seizure of power and as a charged model of politics enacted before an audience: potent in its symbols and immediate effects, but unable to make its leader’s claim identical with the will of Italy.