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Born in 1863 at Pescara, from a rich landowner father, Gabriele d’Annunzio, born Francesco Rapagnetta, published his first poetry collection at the age of sixteen. Frequenting a number of literary circles in Rome, d’Annunzio was proving to be a child prodigy. His first novels, including Il Piacere (The Child of Pleasure, 1889), made a great impression. In 1910, crippled by debt, he fled to France, where he worked with Claude Debussy. A little time before Italy engaged in the war, he went back to the peninsula and strengthened his nationalist and irredentist ideas, openly campaigning for the idea that his country should become one of the major European powers. During the first world war, he committed himself to the fighter pilot section of the army and, one year after the end of the conflict, seized the town of Fiume (the present day Rijeka in Croatia) from 1919-1920.

Gabriele d’Annunzio then retired to his house on Lake Garda and spent his final years writing. Despite having a certain influence on fascist ideology, he was never directly involved with Benito Mussolini's government, in power from 1922. He moreover opposed any rapprochement between Italy and Nazi Germany. Mussolini nevertheless granted him a full state funeral after his death, on the 1st of March 1938, following a cerebral haemorrhage, at Gardone Riveria.

A prolific writer, who has remained very much alive in the Italian and European imagination , Gabriele d’Annunzio was the subject, 70 years after his death, of a two day international conference at the ULg last February. Luciano Curreri, the organizer of the event, brought together a dozen or so universities and research centres in order to dissect the myth of the poet and novelist and the tracks he left behind.