A 'marine pact' by will
The text written by D'Annunzio has just been acquired by the Fondazione il Vittoriale: it reveals his face as a wise mediator and his ideas on work. The president reveals the significance of the operation
by Giordano Bruno Guerri
In 1923, the masses of workers, returning from the trenches, pressed for new rights while Fascism came to power and struggled to contain the opposing thrusts of trade unions and big capitalists. The merchant navy was the battleground between the F.I.L.M. (Italian Federation of Sea Workers), chaired by Giuseppe Giulietti, and the powerful class of shipowners. And at the Vittoriale another social utopia was born after the one at Fiume: imagine Gabriele d'Annunzio not as the Vate of pleasure, poetry and war, but as a stormy trade unionist flanked by another novel character, Giulietti, to whom d'Annunzio wrote with the affectionate nickname of Fafin.
A Romagnolo from Rimini, transplanted to Genoa, magnetic, shrewd and endowed with a rhetoric that even the young Mussolini envied him, in 1914 it was he who lent two thousand lire to Benito (who had just resigned from the Avanti!) to found Il Popolo d'Italia. His 'work of art', however, was the hijacking of the steamship Persia in 1919: a ship loaded with weapons and champagne that he handed over to the Rijeka Legionnaires, guaranteeing the city's economic survival. He founded the Garibaldi Cooperative, in open defiance of the giants of naval capitalism, sharing with d'Annunzio what the Poet called a 'fraternal alliance' in the political battle for the rights of the 'People of the Sea', to which d'Annunzio felt he belonged.
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For the Vate, at the height of his fame, the sea is not simply a natural element. In his early works, the Adriatic is celebrated as a primordial force: 'O sea, O glory, strength of Italia'. It is a sea that 'tempers the nerves and songs', a 'present god' to whom the young poet offers himself in almost religious adoration, demonstrating a profound technical and anthropological knowledge of the life of fishermen. With maturity, the sea takes on a more complex significance, linked to the ideal of the Superman and heroic action. Famous is Pompey the Great's motto of which he took possession: To sail is necessary; it is not necessary to live, and the passage from the aesthetics of words to political passion finds its catalyst in the sea. The Adriatic ceases to be just the sea of intimacy to become the Amarissimo, the mare nostrum to be claimed. In 1908, during a banquet for the tragedy La Nave, which contains the famous verse Arma la prora e salpa verso il mondo, d'Annunzio pronounced a toast to the bitter Adriatic, inflaming patriotic and irredentist sentiment against Austria. During the Great War, he challenged the 'black Adriatic waters' in the Buccari exploit and the flight over Cattaro, experiencing the sea as a heroic space. Finally, during his years at the Vittoriale, he crystallised this relationship in the monument-reliquary of the Nave Puglia, set into the hillside with its prow facing the Adriatic and the irredent lands. The sea, for d'Annunzio, was the mirror of his inimitable life, so much so that he even fables that he was born among the waves aboard a brig.
The heart of the very recent - precious - acquisition of unpublished documents by the Fondazione Il Vittoriale degli Italiani reveals a d'Annunzio tireless legislator and mediator who on 11 July 1923 sends Giulietti the text of the new Pact Marino, written entirely in his own hand. Named by him Pactum sine nomine (because it had no signatures to obscure its popular tune), the document was a masterpiece of social justice that went beyond rhetoric. The pact called for the recognition of the Garibaldi Cooperative, the inviolability of the organic regulations of 1913, indemnities for sailors' families and the creation of an arbitration board to regulate boarding shifts, avoiding privileges and persecution. For d'Annunzio, the sailors are 'his people', the 'tough race that knows how to suffer'. The Pact is not just a contract, it is the 'testimony of a brother sailor' against 'obstinate avarice'.
The documents show how d'Annunzio was the only moral counterbalance capable of speaking as an equal with Mussolini and, at the same time, defending Giulietti from the squadrist aggressions. D'Annunzio used his prestige to 'impose justice' on the government, which he accused of procrastination. He wrote to the Duce, on 18 July 1923: "But you, who were not born a procrastinator and who do not want to die a Cunctator, you stall and you stall!" He accuses him of being a succubus of the ship-owners, 'sea reptiles: I believe, however, that the sea reptiles are trying to cling to you like a new Laocoon in the act of immolating no longer the bull sacred to Neptune but the golden calf to the oceanic fortune of Italia' (telegram to Mussolini, 26 July 1923).
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