A Tale of Shapeless Builders from Alpine Battlefields: on Gabriele D'Annunzio's Garden of Relics

At the end of the First World War, Gabriele D'Annunzio was a national “hero.” Already one of the most famous writers in Europe – Marcel Proust admired him –, he fought for Italian participation in the war and took part in it, performing courageous and spectacular feats. Those continued even after the war, with D’Annunzio heading the short-lived paramilitary occupation of Rijeka, Croatia (1919-1920). Disappointed with the outcome, he decided to retire to a sort of self-imposed exile along the shores of Lake Garda, where he bought an old building and the surrounding estate, transforming and enlarging them. The Vittoriale was born. The transformation of the estate into a vast sequence of gardens began in 1923 with the setting up of a small piece of land where D'Annunzio had shapeless boulders – plus a cubic one – deposited from the main alpine battlefields where the Italian army had fought. The name chosen by the poet was "Giardino delle Reliquie." This “Garden of Relics” immediately imposed itself as the place used for rituals honouring the soldiers who perished in the war; the poet felt he was the only one in Italy entitled to do so. The Garden of Relics is the hidden fulcrum of the Vittoriale and of D'Annunzio's claim – even against Benito Mussolini – of his own centrality in an Italy built on the victory of the war and, therefore, on the sacrifice of those who sacrificed themselves for it. Patriotic rhetoric converges in the Garden of Relics, finding an early realization and becoming a harbinger of consequences: there, a first incarnation of the idea that the sacrifice offered by the war dead is so precious that it cannot be "represented" can be found. At most, the sacrifice can be "presented" by flaunting its "relics." Thus, in a way, a story begins: it will end only in the late Fascist memorials such as Redipuglia (1935-1938).