When Gabriele D’Annunzio is remembered at all, it’s as a picaresque figure from the World War I era—leader of the 1918 “Flight over Vienna” (to drop propaganda leaflets) or “duce” of the briefly independent city-state of Fiume in 1919-20.

“Poet, journalist, novelist, dramatist, daredevil,” Wikipedia calls him, and he was all of those. Mussolini paid him off to keep him out of Italian politics, and borrowed some of his own tactics from him—the Brown Shirts, the balcony speeches, the florid rhetoric. As a result, D’Annunzio has come to be seen as a sort of proto-Fascist, which has some truth to it, but overlooks his merits as a writer. (How serious a Fascist was the man whose charter for Fiume called music the fundamental principle of the state?)

D’Annunzio, born in 1863 to well-off parents, began as a child prodigy and before 1900 had compiled an impressive list of literary achievements—volumes of poetry, novels, plays, and trenchant journalism. In 1894 he began a celebrated love affair with the actress Eleonora Duse, that went on more than 15 years. His interest in aviation began when Wilbur Wright took him up for a spin in 1908, during one of Wright’s tours to sell his airplane to European governments.

D’Annunzio’s best writing was behind him by then, although he continued to write until his death in 1938.

One of his books has followed me through life. This was his Il Fuoco, or The Flame of Life, published in 1900. The Modern Library edition was in my parents’ polyglot library (along with such works as The White Monk of Timbuctoo), and I still have it.

The book is in two divisions, and the titles hint at its exalted and somewhat superheated nature: “The Epiphany of the Flame” and “The Empire of Silence.” The setting is Venice and the main characters are the poet Stelio and his beloved La Foscarina, standing in for D’Annunzio and Duse. La Foscarina, the author writes, “gathered into one deeply conscious glance all the beauty scattered so divinely through that last hour of the September twilight. In the dark, living firmament of her eyes the neighboring garlands of light, created by the oar as it dipped in the water, seemed to encircle the fiery angels that shone from afar on the towers of San Marco and of San Georgio Maggiori.”

And a page later: “A sound of applause burst from the Passage of San Gregorio, echoing along the Grand Canal, re-echoing in the precious discs of porphyry and serpentine adorning the house of the Darios, that stooped under their weight like a decrepit courtesan under the pomp of her jewels.

“The royal barge was passing.”

That kind of writing wouldn’t get far in the post-modern era, but lovers of Venice will understand the impulse. And the description of the Palazzo Dario is, in fact, an absolutely accurate one.