Gabriele D’Annunzio’s temporary blindness

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s temporary blindness began after a 1916 crash landing during a flight to Trieste, in which his friend and pilot, Giuseppe Garassini Garbarino, was killed. Immobilized and unable to see for months, D’Annunzio wrote Notturno in darkness; the injury thus became both the circumstance of the book’s composition and a point of reference in his later public self-presentation.

Injury and circumstances

The blindness followed a dramatic crash landing during one of D’Annunzio’s wartime flying exploits. It was temporary, but it came with prolonged immobility: he composed the work while lying in bed, unable to see. The accident also killed Garassini Garbarino, joining D’Annunzio’s physical incapacity to the loss of the pilot who had accompanied him.

Writing Notturno

D’Annunzio composed Notturno during those months of darkness, writing it word by word on ten thousand scrolls, with each sentence on its own scroll. The book’s method arose from the conditions of his blindness: writing proceeded in fragments rather than through ordinary visual access to the page. When a new edition appeared in December 1921, its spare, death-facing prose prompted debate over whether it was a minor masterpiece or an accident of circumstance. The book’s origins in physical limitation remained central to how its unusual form was understood.

Later self-presentation

In August 1921, at his villa in Gardone, D’Annunzio discussed the definitive edition of Notturno with Italo Balbo and Dino Grandi, describing it as a poetic meditation on death composed during his temporary blindness. In the course of the conversation, he referred to himself as a one-eyed seer. The phrase connected the remembered injury to his cultivated poetic persona, while the request for a night to consider the visitors’ political proposal and his intention to consult the stars placed that self-presentation within the theatrical, symbol-laden setting of his villa.