Gabriele d'Annunzio always nurtured a great love for the houses he inhabited; this feeling is particularly intense for his last home, the Priory, the beating soul of the monumental complex that is the Vittoriale. The Commander furnished it, in fact, with great care and particular attention, transforming the rooms according to his inner vision.

The day after his death, the Priory was closed, and the possibility of entering it remained the prerogative of the few. In May 1975, in the presence of the Minister of Cultural Heritage, Giovanni Spadolini, the house was once again opened to the public thanks to an itinerary through its main rooms.

Fifty years after its inauguration, which has handed back to visitors one of the best places to observe d'Annunzio's intimate image, it was decided to celebrate this important anniversary through a collection of texts, written between the 1920s and today, that deal with the Priory and how it is an expression of the Poet's elegance and taste. The pieces are a fundamental testimony to the way Gabriele d'Annunzio and his aesthetic sense were perceived both while he was alive and afterwards. From Ugo Ojetti to Orio Vergani, from Sibilla Aleramo to Raffaele Carrieri, from Emma Gramatica to Giovanni Spadolini, and from Giorgio Manganelli to Alberto Arbasino, the book brings together the precious testimonies of those who have sought to capture the essence of this evocative place.

The house of d'Annunzio (as seen by Ugo Ojetti), Gardone, 24 February 1922

Cargnacco, above Gardone Riviera. Is this Gabriele d'Annunzio's house? At the end of a sunlit path, it looks old, low, and modest, like a parish priest's house: white plaster and green shutters, the door narrow between the two flat ashlar stone jambs, two windows, one on this side and one on the other, fitted with grilles, and on the first floor a narrow iron balcony from which it is impossible to harangue a crowd, also because the small downhill clearing in front of it could barely hold fifty people of good will. He himself calls this house the Portiuncula or even, laughing, the Rectory. Washing its façade, he has, in fact, discovered between the balcony and the two windows two oval frescoes from the 18th century that depict sacred scenes and are pretty because they are a shadow of their former selves. On the door he has, moreover, nailed two wooden signs, painted in the color of a Franciscan cassock, Clausura and Silentium, which signs in the early days after Fiume must have been more a desperate wish than a respected rule.

Inside, of course, the house is another, heated like an oven, scented with sandalwood, muffled with carpets, and defended by curtains and curtains. But, more than luxury, one feels that the poet seeks here a defense against the noise, the frost, the sun, strangers, and politics: the defense of his work, his books, his freedom, and his memories. This is the first house he has bought for himself in his life, complete with the land registry contract, and he has surrounded it with barriers, walls, fences, and gates with the experience of a trenchman.

First of all, he built himself a henhouse with black roosters and white hens from Tuscany, neat and alive like voices from Crusca: a model henhouse or, as they say, a rational henhouse, surrounded by a wire mesh, well sheltered and ventilated, with wooden houses on a cement floor. Then he provided the garden and the vineyard, and his gardener is called Virgil. (- Beware, I have found it, - he warns at once). The garden, to the right of the house, is vast, a little small still because it was planted by the Thode Germans who owned the house before him, and the Italian beauty, however heartily they strove for it, they saw in touches: but with beautiful cypresses and firs and oaks and laurels and a pleasant grove of magnolias in the shade of which runs a clear stream.

This garden, which descends from the side of the lake, reveals, on the face, Mount Baldo with its hundred peaks, turquoise and white, and on the right, the open lake and the Borghese island and the tip of Manerba with its Dante-esque profile. Behind the house, the garden turns into a park and a forest and falls into a narrow ravine with its romantic little river and waterfalls. This ravine, however graceful and picturesque, threatens the old house. On the bank, a hurricane crashed two colossal trees months ago, and the earth began to slide. If it continued, the corner of the house would rest on emptiness!

So D'Annunzio, in a great hurry, built another stone shoe to support it and had a hundred holes dug along the steep slope to plant a hundred young cypresses. And now he also wants to buy a meadow and a grove on the opposite side so as to block off access to his hermitage from there too; and on the meadow, facing the lake, he will raise a hut of planks and stubble, in the manner of a hermit's hut, to go and shut himself up in it, in even safer peace. Beyond the rectory, the hermitage.

The house has two floors. -I hope to keep them,' the poet observes. It does not mean by this that he intends to rebuild it in his own way. It means that the house is not very solid at the moment, and it will have to be chained and bolted with iron to live there safely. But D'Annunzio is the first homeowner I have ever seen serene and cheerful in front of the cracks in his building. They represent to him the instability of the building, that is, the risk and the unpredictable, and the need to be vigilant and watchful; that man or writer is the sign and the play of his unrestrained energy.

I therefore believe that he enjoys exaggerating a little this decrepitude of his house, but in the meantime it is a great pleasure to hear and watch him documenting it: the large table on which he writes, placed prudently near the balcony so that, if the floor collapses, he can leap to cling to the railing and wait for his men to rescue him with the ladders; a piece of rubble that fell from the ceiling last night while he was sleeping, onto his pillow, a hand's breadth from his head...

Always standing agile, slender, and dressed up, his left shoulder lower than his right, a little out of habit, a little out of the habit of so many hours at the desk, he tells and laughs, with that clear voice and that cackling laugh that remain youthful no matter how many years go by and communicate youth to those who listen. - You are the last Italian who is really twenty years old,' as a friend who is no longer twenty but remembers them once told him.