“city of life”

The “city of life” is Gabriele D’Annunzio’s name for a political and imaginative project in Fiume, recasting a contested city as a source of renewal for the wider world. The expression rises beyond nationalist claims into a promise of collective transformation. Its force comes from the tension between that expansive promise and the city’s material deprivation and growing isolation: Fiume is made to signify life even as its inhabitants face scarcity and its leader loses allies.

From national claim to world-making ideal

On October 24, 1919, at a rally in the Teatro Verdi, Gabriele D’Annunzio begins with an elaborate argument for Fiume’s Italian identity, specifying the boundaries of the nation he wants with cartographic precision. Then the speech changes scale. Fiume is no longer only a city asserting its place within Italy; it becomes a beacon meant to illuminate the West. In this turn, Gabriele D’Annunzio replaces the city’s earlier identity as a place of sacrifice with the promise of the “city of life.” The phrase marks a new vocation: Fiume is imagined not merely as territory to be claimed, but as a model capable of radiating beyond itself.

That enlarged ambition is not presented as a practical program. The oration gathers its power through escalation, moving from boundaries and national belonging toward spiritual renewal and a world transformed by insurgent peoples. Gabriele D’Annunzio calls for the defenseless to be armed and force to be answered with force, while imagining oppressed peoples gathering under Fiume’s insignia. The “city of life” therefore carries a paradox from its first great public appearance: it promises a new and universal life, but its imagined path to that future is bound to conflict. The speech is described as an event whose consequences cannot be calculated, suspended between historical enterprise and caprice rather than reduced to a tactical plan.

A promise under siege

The city’s circumstances sharply contradict the reach of the ideal. Fiume has waited months for annexation to Italy and is living under an embargo that restricts its supplies. Food is rationed; the lack of fuel leaves the city cold and dark. Children from poor families are sent to Italian households in a public appeal for relief, and Gabriele D’Annunzio offers to take one into his home in Milan. The city also forbids the production and sale of its celebrated pastries. These details give the expression a material counterweight: the “city of life” is not a description of abundance, but a claim maintained in a place struggling to secure ordinary necessities.

The contrast becomes especially pointed because Gabriele D’Annunzio knows how severe the economic situation has become. The port is in disrepair, essential goods are scarce, and a new currency is accelerating inflation. Yet his public rhetoric raises rather than lowers its stakes, lifting the cause from administration and supply toward the soul and immortality. The phrase thus works as a wager against present conditions. It does not resolve the crisis; it gives the crisis a grander meaning, asking listeners to see the embattled city as the beginning of a future rather than as a community running short of food and fuel.

Democracy, solidarity, and the living city

The expression also finds a political counterpart in the draft constitution that Alceste De Ambris delivers to Gabriele D’Annunzio in March 1920. The proposed Republic of Carnaro is founded on the rights of workers and individuals. Its principles extend citizenship across differences of sex, race, language, class, and religion, and promise freedoms of press, speech, thought, religion, and sexual liberty. They also include elementary education, physical education, minimum wages, and assistance in cases of illness, disability, unemployment, and old age. Gabriele D’Annunzio revises the text to insist that a life made worthy by liberty must also be beautiful. In this setting, the “city of life” names more than nationalist vitality: it is linked to a proposed civic order in which freedom and social provision make dignity possible.

That constitutional possibility unfolds beside continued hardship rather than replacing it. The city’s spring is described as false, its survival dependent on the government in Rome, which controls the flow of food supplies. This juxtaposition keeps the ideal from settling into a simple celebration. The phrase points toward democratic and social aspirations, while Fiume’s reliance on outside provisions shows how vulnerable their realization remains. The gap between the intended life and the constrained life of the city is part of the expression’s meaning.

Fervor, isolation, and the phrase’s afterlife

By June 1920, political and military relations within Fiume have also deteriorated. Forces of order have left, clashes have occurred among troops, and Nicola Bombacci’s attempts to secure an agreement with socialists for a shared seizure of power have failed. The socialists repudiate Gabriele D’Annunzio; the Fiume National Council is openly hostile to him. Increasingly cut off from the world, he must wait for the morning newspapers to learn what is happening elsewhere. Yet the language of the “city of life” persists in the image of Fiume as a place of perpetual celebration, a community dancing before a hostile world and the sea. The expression now carries the strain between its promise of collective vitality and the leader’s isolation from political partners and information.

The city’s devotion to Gabriele D’Annunzio gives that persistence a personal and ritual dimension. In poor households, religious images are removed and lamps are placed before his portrait. The scene presents the leader’s public image as a focus of fervor, while the idea of life remains entangled with a sense of approaching loss: the celebration is described as nearly over, yet not entirely finished. The phrase is therefore neither a straightforward account of Fiume’s condition nor simply an empty slogan. It is an ideal sustained through performance and belief even as the political venture narrows.

In Gabriele D’Annunzio’s New Year address, Fiume’s year of passion is set against the weariness and distrust associated with the Versailles settlement. The city signifies youth, beauty, light, and life, while its dead are made part of a future imagined as larger than the losses of war. But Gabriele D’Annunzio remains in Fiume against the wishes of its inhabitants, and Italians do not follow him as he hopes. The aspiration that the city might stand for a renewed world thus meets political refusal. Later images in the book of fascist rebirth, youthful vigor, and a people becoming a nation and a state echo this wider vocabulary of renewal, but they do not erase the particular history of the phrase: its defining setting is the embattled Fiume project, where the promised city of life coexists with scarcity, dissent, and an uncertain end.