"D’Annunzio’s political playbook outlived him. Although he later vocally opposed both Adolf Hitler and his great admirer Benito Mussolini, he had nevertheless laid the aesthetic groundwork for them to follow. The black uniform of the “arditi” was adopted by Mussolini’s Blackshirts (so too their experiments with castor oil). But it was d’Annunzio’s canny ability to transform politics into an aesthetic — even religious — experience that proved most prescient. His narratives of bygone eras of glory, of virility expressed through violence, whipped an alienated and fractious populace into frenzy. His blithe disregard for truth allowed him to create — unfettered — his own reality. A morally repellent but brilliant man, he recognized that his countrymen’s desire for a modern myth outstripped their more material needs. And he gave them one." (The New York Times, 2019)