Bisanzio e l’Italia “bisantina” tra letteratura, estetica e ideologia. Il caso D’Annunzio

Even as a child, D’Annunzio felt a ‘porphyrogenitus’: biologically, genetically Byzantine. Yet he never got to see Constantinople with his own eyes, nor could he give any description of it. The love for Byzantium, in D’Annunzio’s work, remained imprisoned in tiny tesserae of his immense literary mosaic and was expressed above all in the transference with Venice and Ravenna, which remained the two poles of D’Annunzio’s ‘public’ Byzantinism. He was born and raised on the “Greek sea”, and always constant in his passion for the “second Byzantium” and in his fascination for the capital of the Exarchate. Not least because, with the escalation of nationalism on the Italian domestic scene and the thickening of compromising implications of neo-Byzantine ideology on the international scene, the literary probyzantinism or ‘bisantinismo’ of which D’Annunzio had been a prophet in his youthful Roman years turned out to be ideologically risky. The “Byzantine” aesthetic construction that the poet had made of Rome in the “Cronaca bizantina” of Sommaruga folded in on itself and that youthful mythology was increasingly bent to patriotic ideology and definitively shifted to the antibyzantinism of the Adriatic world in conjunction with the political adventure of Fiume.