September 11, 1919

September 11, 1919, is the date on which Gabriele D’Annunzio set out from Venice toward Fiume with a small company of rebellious grenadiers, turning an irredentist cause into an armed challenge to Italy’s government and the Allied command. It was also the night Benito Mussolini received D’Annunzio’s first dispatch. The date therefore joins two different kinds of action: a march toward the disputed city and a political test of whether the Fascist leader would follow the poet beyond public endorsement.

Postwar setting and the Fiume cause

The expedition drew force from a Europe reshaped by mass death and demobilization. The book presents the returning veterans as a vast political presence: millions of soldiers crossing back over national borders, while older liberal politicians appear unable to meet the crisis. D’Annunzio’s undertaking addressed this postwar audience through an appeal to action, national honor, and the possibility of a new beginning. The conflict over Fiume was not simply a local dispute. The inter-Allied command controlled the city, while Woodrow Wilson intended it to pass to the Yugoslavs; Italian rulers, in the account, were prepared to accept that outcome.

The grenadiers had already been expelled from Fiume after a clash involving French troops and the Italian tricolor. Returning without authorization meant defying the Italian high command as well as the inter-Allied authorities. The party of 187 men was outnumbered by the forces arrayed against it, but expected support from Fiume’s civilian population, mostly Italian. The date thus marks the choice to wager on a small, personal act of rebellion against a much larger political and military order.

Departure from Venice and the road to Ronchi

D’Annunzio began the journey in poor health. He rose feverish from bed and put on the uniform of a lieutenant colonel of the Novara Lancers. The book recalls that he had lost an eye in a wartime plane crash and was still affected by the injury. From the landing near his Venetian residence, he travelled by covered motorboat; on the mainland, a red Fiat Tipo 4 awaited him. Among those accompanying the expedition were a Sardinian Grenadier lieutenant and Guido Keller, a decorated air-force veteran who had joined the conspiracy.

The party reached Ronchi, near the border, shortly after sunset. Its planned transport failed to arrive: trucks requested from the Palmanova car park had been promised by the local commander, but by midnight none had appeared. The delay revealed that the company had been betrayed, though the account does not identify the betrayer. D’Annunzio slept on a makeshift bed while Keller went out into the night with Tommaso Beltrami. Several hours later, about thirty surplus military trucks appeared in the square. The column then set out in darkness, before dawn. September 11 is consequently the date of the expedition’s launch, not the date on which the marchers reached or took Fiume.

At Castelnuovo, the column encountered four armoured cars and Bersaglieri who had been positioned to stop it. D’Annunzio spoke with the Italian officers; within minutes, the cars were accompanying the rebels instead. The account presents this defection as an early reversal in the journey: a force sent to bar the way became protection for the column. The expedition’s progress depended not only on its declared cause but also on the willingness of Italian soldiers to disobey their orders.

Mussolini’s dispatch and qualified support

Mussolini received D’Annunzio’s first letter on the night of September 11, as he and Rachele Mussolini were leaving a theatre. D’Annunzio informed him that he had set out and intended to take Fiume by force the following morning, asked him to support the cause through his newspaper, and framed the venture as a contest in which the spirit could overcome the failing body. The letter made Mussolini a recipient of the plan, but not a participant in the march.

In the following days, Mussolini praised D’Annunzio in Il Popolo d’Italia, attacked Francesco Saverio Nitti for threatening repression, and defended the expedition as both noble and rational. Yet he did not issue the general call to insurrection that D’Annunzio wanted, and he remained in Milan rather than joining the rebels. At a meeting of the Fascist committees on September 16, there was no plan to break the government’s blockade around Fiume; the limited proposal was to send women and children to the border. The gap between the poet’s demand for wider action and Mussolini’s restraint was already visible in the first exchange of letters.

Symbolic promise and political limits

D’Annunzio later cast 1919 as the year of Fiume and passion, in opposition to the exhausted diplomacy represented by Versailles. In that vision, Fiume stood for youth, life, faith, and a future carried forward by the dead and the generations yet to come. The expedition that began on September 11 supplied the material drama for that language: a wounded poet, a small band of volunteers, and soldiers prepared to turn against the orders meant to contain them.

But the book also emphasizes the limits of that promise. D’Annunzio remained in Fiume despite the wishes of the Fiumani, while Italian popular attention shifted elsewhere and his authority as a figure of youth began to look increasingly fragile. September 11 therefore has a double significance. It inaugurates a spectacular act of defiance, but it also opens the period in which Mussolini could praise the poet’s example while keeping his own movement clear of the expedition’s most immediate risks. The date stands at the intersection of political spectacle and calculation: rebellion on the road to Fiume, and a separate struggle over who would turn its symbolism into power.