Zadar, a city disputed by Italy and Yugoslavia, became the scene of a brief but charged extension of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Fiume enterprise. On November 14, 1919, the population welcomed him as a hero. His visit turned the city into a stage for the movement’s public symbols and its still-unabandoned ambition to carry the spirit of Fiume beyond the occupied city.

A Triumphal Arrival

D’Annunzio’s entry into Zadar was described as triumphal. Before the crowd, he unfurled Giovanni Randaccio’s flag; the people knelt before it in the mud. The gesture made the flag more than a marker of national allegiance: in the scene, collective homage gave visible form to the claim that Fiume’s cause might speak to a wider audience.

The Fiume Project Reaches Outward

For a moment, the welcome seemed to validate the plan to carry Fiume’s torch into the world. In the command room, D’Annunzio’s followers resumed planning a march on Rome, repeating the slogan “Marciare non marcire”—“March, don’t rot.” Zadar thus appears not as the site of a lasting political settlement, but as a point where the Fiume project briefly seemed capable of renewed expansion.

A Brief Resurgence

That apparent momentum soon met a political reversal. Two days after D’Annunzio’s arrival, election results from Rome confirmed the Socialists’ victory and Francesco Saverio Nitti as prime minister. The book sets the acclaim in Zadar against a country prioritizing bread and wages over national glory: the visit’s public intensity was real, but it could not determine Italy’s political direction. Zadar’s significance in the narrative lies in that contrast between a moment of ceremonial ascent and the approaching end of the Fiume rebellion.