By Michael Dirda

Today, Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938) is little known to most American readers, being remembered, if at all, as some sort of decadent poet and novelist who enjoyed a stormy love affair with the great actress Eleonora Duse. But in his time, he was as famous as a rock star and in Italy remains to this day a figure of huge literary, cultural and historical consequence.

D'Annunzio was arguably the finest Italian writer of his time, an aesthete who made Oscar Wilde look like a bourgeois, a sexual charmer of Casanovan suavity and appetite, a World War I aviator and war hero, and a political zealot and spellbinding orator from whom Mussolini learned how to become "Il Duce."

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Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com