Randaccio’s flag

Randaccio’s flag is the tricolor associated with the death of infantry captain Giovanni Randaccio and with Gabriele D’Annunzio’s campaign to keep the claims to Fiume and Dalmatia alive. Displayed above a corpse, carried as a relic, and later unfurled before a crowd, it gives political longing a tangible focus. Its significance lies in that transformation: the flag’s material link to a dead soldier becomes a public symbol of national loss and a means of turning remembrance into a pledge of action.

Origin as a battlefield relic

The flag enters the narrative as a shroud wrapped around Randaccio’s corpse. D’Annunzio’s jeweled hand caresses the tricolor as it hangs from the balcony of the Campidoglio. Randaccio, an infantry captain and D’Annunzio’s close friend, had died during the tenth battle of the Isonzo in a suicidal assault on a hill at the mouth of the Timavo. The flag’s folds therefore signify more than a national emblem: they carry the memory of a particular dead man and the violence of the battle in which he fell.

The scene makes the flag’s physical condition part of its meaning. Blood darkens its red, and the crowd below studies the cloth while discreetly feeling its own bodies for missing limbs. The flag connects the individual dead to the survivors’ sense of loss without making their experiences identical. D’Annunzio presents it as an object that has been close to death, while the people gathered beneath it encounter their own wartime injuries and absences through its presence.

Mourning and the territorial claim

In his speech from the Campidoglio, D’Annunzio identifies the cloth as the flag that had served as a pillow for a dying hero at Quota 12 and the Stone Quarry. He describes the dead soldier’s image as remaining on it, comparing the association to the Holy Shroud. The comparison sacralizes the object: it is not merely evidence of Randaccio’s death but a surface onto which the speaker projects the likeness of the fallen and, through them, the nation’s dead.

D’Annunzio then makes mourning conditional on a political outcome. He declares that Randaccio’s flag will remain draped in black until Fiume and Dalmatia belong to Italy, and calls on good citizens to cover their own flags in mourning until that day. The private relic thus becomes a model for a collective ritual. A visible act of mourning marks a continuing territorial demand, keeping the unresolved claim present in public life rather than allowing grief to close around the dead alone.

From mourning cloth to political theater

The flag returns in Fiume several months later, still carried in the infantry rucksack in which D’Annunzio keeps it. He unfolds it before the crowd and removes its band of black crepe. That change does not erase the mourning associated with the flag; it stages a transition from mourning toward fulfillment. Calling it the Timavo flag, D’Annunzio asks the population whether it confirms its earlier vow. The crowd answers yes, and he proclaims Fiume’s annexation to Italy. The flag is central to the scene’s political choreography: its battlefield history lends weight to the question, while its presence helps turn the audience from spectators into participants in a renewed pledge.

The sequence also shows how the flag’s significance depends on repeated public display. At the Campidoglio it hangs from a balcony above a motionless crowd; in Fiume it is unfolded as part of an appeal that receives a collective response. The same object can carry mourning and mobilization because the ceremony changes around it. Its passage from the corpse to D’Annunzio’s keeping, and from a mourning band to an annexation ceremony, makes the material relic a link between past sacrifice and present political performance.

Memory, belonging, and limits

D’Annunzio’s language expands the flag’s association from Randaccio to all those who died for their country. In this account, the dead resemble one another, and the cloth stands for their shared sacrifice. That universalizing gesture gives the flag a broad national reach, but the narrative also keeps its meaning anchored in a specific history: one captain, one fatal assault, and the claims to Fiume and Dalmatia. Its symbolic force comes from holding those scales together—the recognizable relic of an individual death and the emblem through which a crowd is asked to imagine a common cause.

The flag also belongs to a wider postwar world in which veterans, survivors, and political leaders struggle over what the dead are to mean. The narrative describes Europe as a stage emptied by mass death and emphasizes the pressure of millions of returning soldiers. Against that background, the flag offers a concentrated, portable image of loss that can be placed before an audience and given a political direction. It does not itself resolve the competing claims or restore the dead; it makes remembrance visible, repeatable, and available for collective action.

Its changing presentation therefore matters as much as its colors. Wrapped around Randaccio, it signifies death; draped in black, it enacts ongoing grievance; stripped of mourning crepe and raised before the people of Fiume, it accompanies a public vow and its proclaimed fulfillment. The flag’s journey shows how a battlefield object can become a political instrument without losing the trace of the person whose death first made it a relic.