Filed under: Macht Spass | Tags: fascism, fiume, gabriele d'annunzio, italian history, italy, modernity and its discontents, music videos, nationalisms, rijeka, yugoslavia
These two songs by contemporary Italian band Ultima Frontiera [warning: MySpace link!] have both become a fairly regular part of my gym playlist.
After World War One and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both Italians and Croats laid claim to Fiume/Rijeka.
While the city’s future was being negotiated in September 1919, Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio led a band of 2,000 nationalist irregulars to take it by force, declaring Fiume to be the “Regency of Carnaro.” Italy demanded that d’Annunzio step down, but he responded by declaring war on Italy, only backing down after a bombardment by the Italian Navy in December 1920.
d’Annunzio ran his self-proclaimed state with a heavy dose of emotional theatrics. He addressed crowds from a balcony, had his supporters wear black shirts and black fezes, introduced what we now know as the Fascist salute, and created the nonsensical chant of “Eia! Eia! Alala!” to rally his supporters.
d’Annunzio also co-authored a utopian charter for his state with revolutionary syndicalist Alceste De Ambris. Carnaro would have been a sort of renaissance city-state, organized into ten all-encompassing professional guilds, committed to equality between the sexes, and prepared to hand power over to a single supreme dictator in times of “extreme peril.” But the most famous passage in the Charter is probably the following:
In the Italian province of Carnaro, music is a social and religious institution. Once in a thousand or two thousand years music springs from the soul of a people and flows on for ever. A noble race is not one that creates a God in its own image but one that creates also the song wherewith to do Him homage.
Every rebirth of a noble race is a lyric force, every sentiment that is common to the whole race, a potential lyric; music, the language of ritual, has power, above all else, to exalt the achievement and the life of man. Does it not seem that great music has power to bring spiritual peace to the strained and anxious multitude?
So we’ll ignore for the moment the whole thing where d’Annunzio is credited with having invented Italian Fascism, and just say that this song, based on a poem that he later wrote about the Regency of Carnaro, may be the most amazing thing ever.
EIA EIA ALALA! EIA EIA ALALA!
The end of that story is that Italy formally annexed Fiume in 1924, and it stayed under Italian control until it was occupied by the German military.
After returning from Fiume, d’Annunzio was essentially forced into house arrest in his villa. He continued to stay away from public life after the Fascists took power, because while he was a major inspiration to Mussolini, with whom he exchanged over 500 letters over the course of his life, he was also a potential threat to Mussolini’s power and an unwanted critic of some of Mussolini’s policies. For these reasons Mussolini mostly bribed him to keep quiet.
d’Annunzio died in 1938 and therefore never saw the end of World War Two, when the city was given to Yugoslavia, and a great number of the Italians in the surrounding area were forced to leave their homes. [I haven't actually read that book and do not know enough about this to tell you what this particular mass movement of Italians should be called, but it would be a place to go if you were curious.]
Some people are still very angry about this, including this band Ultima Frontiera, who have a lot of other songs with Italian irredentist themes.
My favorite of their songs is definitely Terra Rossa, which features the refrain “Istria, Fiume e Dalmazia–né slovenia! né croazia!“:
I don’t actually have an opinion about who should be in charge of Istria, but pretending that I do sure gets me through the last 500 meters of my rowing sets.
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