Masculinity and Commemoration of the Great War: Gabriele D'Annunzio's La beffa di Buccari and Eugenio Baroni's Monumento al Fante

Abstract

This essay examines two examples of the commemoration of World War I, one a written text, La beffa di Buccari (1918), by Gabriele D'Annunzio, and the other a 1921 proposal for a war memorial entitled Monumento al Fante by sculptor Eugenio Baroni. Before the war, both men had produced deeply patriotic works and availed themselves almost exclusively of female personifications of the nation and images of motherhood when commemorating the heroic deeds of the Italian people. However, during and after the war, when the majority of public literary and sculptural memorials still relied on maternal rhetoric to articulate the mourning process, D'Annunzio and Baroni deviated from these norms. Yet La beffa di Bucari augmented D'Annunzio's reputation as a hero, while the Monumento al Fante was, after several controversial years, eventually deemed unacceptable as a public memorial and remained unrealized. The similarities between the two post-war works under consideration — particularly their reliance on male figures as mourners and bearers of memory — respond to the intensity of the relationships formed at the front and the closeness that developed between men. I will argue that the differences between the two — the fact that D'Annunzio's narrative takes place entirely within the war zone and Baroni's breaks the barrier between battle front and home front — as well as their particular historical contexts, account for the success of the former and the rejection of the latter as an official memory of the war.