Gabriele d’Annunzio, Italian poet, novelist, short story writer, dramatist, journalist, essayist, and scriptwriter, was a leading Italian author in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since 1914, he also played an active role in Italian politics and became a national war hero and ideologist of the nationalists. His nonconformist model of aesthetic life (life as a work of art), his successful literary career, his political engagement in the Great War, and even his scandalous affairs surrounded his life with a legendary aura and contributed to making him one of the most striking personalities of the period in Italy, where he was and still is called, by antonomasia, the ‘Vate’ (the Bard).