Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [198]
On June 19 the Orlando government finally fell, but Sonnino and two others stayed on to sign the Treaty of Versailles on Italy’s behalf. Orlando in later years took pride in the fact that he was not a signatory; in fact, he argued, Wilson had effectively excluded him from the Peace Conference with his appeal to the people of Italy. Although Italy had taken little part in drawing up the treaty, it did not do badly: it had a permanent seat on the League of Nations council, the Tyrol and a share in the reparations from Germany. That was not the view in Italy, however. As the British ambassador wrote to a friend: “They are I am sorry to say very sore and depressed here. Not less perhaps because they feel that their own representatives have in many ways mismanaged things.” 62
The government of Francesco Nitti, which succeeded Orlando’s, was preoccupied with Italy’s internal problems. Where it could settle outstanding foreign issues, it was more than willing to do so. The new foreign minister, Tommaso Tittoni, met Venizelos and worked out an agreement between Italy and Greece over Albania and the Dodecanese. There was even some movement on the Adriatic. In August 1919, Tittoni agreed with Lloyd George and Clemenceau that Fiume should become a neutral city under the League and that the whole of Dalmatia should go to Yugoslavia. The proposal was sent off to Wilson, by now back in the United States, but before an answer could come back, D’Annunzio decided to settle the matter his own way.
Various groups, some in the military, as well as veterans’ associations, fascists and anarchists, had been plotting more or less openly all summer to seize Fiume. D’Annunzio, who was engrossed in a new love affair, was finally persuaded to lead them. On the evening of September 11 (chosen because he thought the number eleven lucky), he set off with about two hundred men. The next day, as the soldiers sent to stop him joined his force, he marched triumphantly into Fiume. The Italian military command withdrew without a murmur, the other Allied forces more reluctantly. The city, at least the Italian parts, went wild. That evening D’Annunzio made the first of his dramatic speeches from the balcony of the governor’s palace.
For the next fifteen months, Fiume was caught up in a mad carnival of ceremonies, spectacles, balls and parties. The town’s buildings were covered with flags and banners, its gardens ransacked for flowers to throw at the parades. In a fever of nationalism and revolution, fueled by drink and drugs, priests demanded the right to marry and young women stayed out all night. The city reverberated, said observers, with the sounds of love-making. A hospital was set aside to treat venereal diseases.63 Volunteers and the merely curious from all over Italy and Europe dodged the ineffectual Allied blockade: E.F.T. Marinetti, the Futurist artist; the young Arturo Toscanini, with his orchestra; Guglielmo Marconi, the developer of the wireless; opposition politicians from Rome; gangsters and prostitutes; war aces with their planes; and Mussolini. Modern pirates on commandeered boats darted in and out of Fiume to seize supplies up and down the Adriatic. Armed men wandered the streets in uniforms of their own design. “Some had beards, and had shaved their heads completely,” reported Osbert Sitwell. “Others had cultivated huge tufts of hair, half a foot long, waving out of their foreheads, and wore, balanced on the very back of the skull, a black fez.” Most alarmingly for the Italian government, many of its own officers, from war heroes to distinguished generals, threw their lot in with D’Annunzio.64
D’Annunzio’s oratory reached new heights. Fiume was sacred, the city of liberty, from which he would lead a crusade, to liberate first Dalmatia, then Italy, and finally the world. He made contacts with the Bolsheviks, with Egyptian nationalists, with Croats unhappy with the new Yugoslavia, and with Sinn Fein. Wild rumors, some of them true,