“A man’s greatness is to be a bridge, not a goal”

“A man’s greatness is to be a bridge, not a goal” appears as a guiding maxim in the account of Fiume under Gabriele D’Annunzio. The sentence defines greatness through passage rather than arrival: a person matters as a means by which something beyond the self may be approached, not as the final object of devotion. The book places the maxim beside the image of D’Annunzio keeping a votive lamp lit on an altar to Zarathustra, joining political leadership to a language of spiritual aspiration even as Fiume’s experiment nears its end.

Meaning and Fiume

The bridge image is both elevated and unstable. It offers a way to understand a leader as a passage toward a future, rather than as that future’s completed embodiment. In Fiume, however, the maxim appears amid a city sustained by fervor and facing a hostile world. The account describes residents replacing saints’ images with lamps before D’Annunzio’s portrait, while the city dances before the sea and death. Against that setting, the bridge is not a promise that the destination will be reached; it is an ideal of greatness held in view at a moment when the political venture is described as almost over.

The wording’s placement also binds personal devotion to a larger aspiration. The lamp, the altar, and Zarathustra give the sentence a ceremonial setting, but its stated logic resists making the leader an ultimate end. That tension is important: the scene shows D’Annunzio being honored as a commanding presence, while the maxim describes greatness as service to what lies beyond the individual. The book leaves that contrast open rather than resolving it into a simple judgment.

A bridge amid political expectation

Elsewhere, the book portrays crowds gathered in expectation of a political threshold. On April 15, 1919, thousands of proletarians assemble at the Milan arena amid a sense that catastrophe and revolution are approaching. Later, a breakaway group moves toward the Duomo, carrying the demonstration from the stadium into the city. The expression does not appear in this episode, but its distinction between passage and destination offers a way to read the scene’s momentum: the march advances toward an anticipated transformation, while the transformation itself remains uncertain.

That uncertainty becomes a confrontation in Piazza del Duomo. Women lead the socialist column with a portrait of Lenin and a red flag, singing and calling for a better life for their children. Opposite them stands a smaller procession of men shaped by years of daily coexistence with killing. When the police cordon opens, the encounter rapidly becomes a brief battle. The two processions do not share the same relation to the future: one arrives in the belief that it is marching toward liberation, while the other brings a different familiarity with death. Read beside the bridge maxim, the scene emphasizes the gap between a promised destination and the human beings made to bear the passage toward it.

Spectacle and the making of a political community

The book also turns political action into spectacle. At a gathering in Milan, a Very rocket rises over the piazza, its light recalling the flares used to illuminate no man’s land during the war. The crowd watches its arc in silence; the flare becomes the starting signal for the proceedings. This episode does not repeat the maxim, but it shares its concern with transition: a signal turns an assembled crowd into an audience poised for action. The bridge, in this context, can be understood as an image of passage between political states, while the flare makes that passage visible as a staged and collective moment.

A different kind of collective passage appears in the burial of the Unknown Soldier. After traveling across Italy by special train amid cheering crowds, the chosen body is buried on November 4, the anniversary of victory over Austria. The ceremony gives an unidentifiable fallen soldier the role of representative for all the dead. The book presents the marble coffin as an altar for a war in which killing had become mechanical and death collective and impersonal. The burial turns anonymous loss into a national ritual, an act of remembrance that gives the dead a symbolic place within the living community. Set beside the bridge maxim, this scene sharpens the difference between a person who serves as a passage toward a shared future and a body made to stand for a completed national sacrifice.

Return to the earth

The final image in the evidence is another burial, this time of what remains of Giacomo Matteotti. On August 21, his coffin is returned to his home region for a funeral in Fratta Polesine, at the wishes of his wife, Velia. She rejects a political burial in Rome’s Verano cemetery. At Monterotondo station and then in Fratta, crowds of peasants, laborers, and railway workers gather; their cries demand vengeance, justice, and retribution. The funeral’s destination is not an abstract national monument but the place of Matteotti’s origins, where his elderly mother accompanies the coffin and mourns the last of her seven children.

This return gives the bridge image a grave counterpoint. The maxim imagines greatness as movement beyond the self, but the funeral insists on particular lives, family grief, and the consequences of political violence. Across these scenes, the book places ideals of passage beside the crowds, ceremonies, and losses through which political meaning is made. The expression endures not as a guarantee that history reaches its promised destination, but as a standard against which devotion to leaders, collective rituals, and the human costs of political journeys can be measured.