Don't mention the war

It wasn’t me who mentioned the war. It was the waiter. He asked if we would like to see the Nazi command bunker they had just discovered beneath the garden of the Albergo Elena.

How could we refuse. So he took us, by the light of an expiring torch, down a neatly-rendered tunnel that zig-zagged at right angles and descended to a vaulted brick hideaway. And we were able, before the torch flickered and died, to sift through the discarded wartime junk and wine bottles with which the floor was littered.

Actually, I have no way of knowing whether the bunker was what he said it was, but the locals nodded sagely when told about it. They certainly had an eventful war here. For it was on the shores of Lake Garda that, from 1943-45, Benito Mussolini made his last stand.

Springing him from Allied incarceration in a ski-lodge in the rugged Abruzzi region to the east of Rome, the Nazis installed him in the puppet Republic of Salo, in what little Italian territory they still controlled. A big fascist in a small pond.

Here he starred in his own little side show to the main war which, if not quite ‘Ello ‘Ello, was certainly Salo Salo.

His strutting ground was the elegant little towns of the Garda riviera - Gargagno, Gardone and Salo itself . Each a hot huddle of ochre and blood-red villas clustered round a tiny harbour and a couple of slightly dusty but still-grand hotels, they have the white mountains behind them and the silver lake at their feet. There are palms, cypresses and oleanders, and a lakeside road which was cut through the rocks on the orders of Il Duce to link the tiny towns of this tinpot kingdom.

You can mention the war in all of them. I did, and I got away with it. It is, after all, a significant anniversary this year. Not for Mussolini, but for his greatest mentor, the Italian patriot, soldier and poet Gabriele d’Annunzio.

It is 60 years since the death of d’Annunzio, who built a spectacular monument - to Italy, to the Italians but most of all to himself - on the foothills above Gardone and bequeathed it to the nation. Mussolini was a regular visitor and, when given the run of northern Italy, chose Garda for his fiefdom because of d’Annunzio. Why, he even installed his mistress, Claretta Petacci, in a villa on the estate where d’Annunzio used to keep his wife tucked away while he frolicked in the main house with his lover and a harem of girlie admirers.

I mentioned the war in the tourist office in Gargagno, and the girl pointed me up the lane to the northern edge of town where Mussolini’s former private residence, the Villa Feltrinelli, stands.

Once neglected, this pink iced cake of a country house is now being converted into a luxury hotel. The forest of saplings that have colonised the extensive gardens were being thinned by a gang of men with chainsaws, but the main gate still seemed to be in active use as a public urinal. I peered through the gloom of the house, with its disturbing ghosts, to the lake beyond, where windsurfers sailed past in an altogether brighter, newer world.

A few hundred yards back towards town I found Mussolini’s official residence, the Palazzo Feltrinelli. Home and office are separated by a grassy public beach where adults sit beneath the olive trees while children leap from a short concrete jetty into the lake.

The Palazzo Feltrinelli, which looks like a provincial town hall with extra flourishes, is now a summer study centre of the University of Milan. Its grand rooms have been sub-divided for tutorials and offices, and students wander in and out - without a shiny boot between them.

Driving south down Mussolini’s road, where the contrast between cool pitch-black tunnels and blinding sunshine is disorientating for the driver, you reach Salo itself, where they would much rather you came to admire the Gothic cathedral or the Palazzo Fantoni with its ancient library than dwell upon the dubious interlude with Mussolini. In any case, from 12.30 until 5.00 the whole place seemed to be asleep in the sun, doors firmly closed, so we moved on.

A few kilometres further, in Gardone, there is another landmark - the Villa Fiordaliso where il Duce and his mistress would meet up for what the Michelin guide delicately describes as “trysts”.

Once the home of Gabriele d’Annunzio, until he moved up the hill to the grand memorial he called Il Vittoriale, it is now an exclusive six-bedroom hotel. The restaurant is renowned, but the doorhandles still have swastikas on them.

But perhaps the best place to mention the war is at Il Vittoriale.

It is a huge bordello of a mansion. An incredibly rich, eccentric and voluptuous place where, in its design, furnishings and decoration, Biba meets the Third Reich. A blending of the sacred and profane, it easily eclipses such monuments to kitsch as Elvis Presley’s Graceland.

The rooms are each very different, but share an overpowering atmosphere of cloistered theatricality. Hating direct light, d’Annunzio ensured that the sun is diffused by coloured glass, windows within windows, shutters, blinds and curtains, giving a subdued, muffled intimacy to the house. A black cat slunk along with us on the tour, until nabbed and slung out by the guide.

There is the Stanza della Musica, the music room, where a thick black silk drapery covers walls and ceiling and the two grand pianos, bass clarinet, rustic pipe and violin are squeezed in among 15 Doric columns of varying heights, topped with sculptures or lamps in the shape of pumpkins and bowls of fruit.

There is the Stanza del Mappamondo - room of the globe - in which you find the death mask of Napoleon, alongside his hour glass and the snuff box that he used in exile on St Helena. Among the war relics is a tripod-mounted Austrian machine-gun which sits in the middle of the carpet.

There is the dining room where, on one end of the long table, sits a huge turtle with a genuine shell and bronze body. The original expired after consuming a surfeit of tuberoses in the Vittoriale gardens, and the model was placed here by d’Annunzio as an admonition to moderation. Gluttony was one of only five sins which d’Annunzio considered deadly. He conveniently left off lust and avarice from his list.

But by far the most affecting room is the Stanza del Lebbroso - the room of the leper. This was d’Annunzio’s death chamber, and when he died on March 1, 1938 his body was laid out on the narrow ceremonial bed behind gilt banisters. There is a disturbing touch of the Hannibal Lecters in the squares of chamois leather with which the walls are covered and the curtains before the death bed are made.

Though this was d’Annunzio’s house, the echoes of Mussolini are very strong.

In the Stanza del Mascheraio, the room of the mask maker, into which guests were ushered, is an inscription placed there before one of Mussolini’s visits and addressed particularly to the man who hoped to turn Italy into one of the greatest powers in the world:

“To the visitor: Do you bring the mirror of Narcissus?
This is lead glass, O mask-maker.
Adjust your masks on your visage
But remember that you are glass against steel.”

As Mussolini’s forerunner, d’Annunzio was keen to keep il Duce in his place. He refused to travel to Rome to meet him. Mussolini had to come here. Had he chosen to visit d’Annunzio in his writing room on the first floor he would have had to bow like everyone else as he came into the presence of the master - d’Annunzio had the door made low so all had to duck to enter.

Yet the photographs of the pair in the house and the souvenir guidebook show d’Annunzio as a hunched and deferential little figure strolling in the gardens alongside Il Duce; a Mother Teresa to his Princess Diana.

Nevertheless, it was when d’Annunzio gave up on politics himself and retired to this house that he left a gap which Mussolini stepped in to.

d’Annunzio had fought heroically for Italy in the First World War, and lost an eye in the process. Yet he, and many Italians, were sorely vexed at the perceived wrongs which occurred before that conflict, in which Austria dispossessed Italy of Trento and Trieste and, afterwards, that the US and the League of Nations ignored her claim to the Gulf of Istria.

d’Annunzio took swashbuckling direct action to help avenge those wrongs. Setting off in his Fiat 4 convertible with a horde of cohorts he occupied the port of Fiume on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia and established a regency there that lasted from September 1919 to December 1920.

While the man on the Rome omnibus thought this was a great wheeze, the authorities did not. Italy’s then Prime Minister, Giovanni Giolitti, ordered the shelling of the
city in an attack that D'Annunzio called "the Christmas of Blood."


d’Annunzio’s reaction was to abandon political life for Lake Garda and il Vittoriale, leaving a vacuum for Mussolini to fill. And as he built, he hit upon the perfect way of financing his grandiose vision. He bequeathed the Vittoriale estate to the nation. In return, a grateful nation was prepared to advance whatever funds d’Annunzio needed to create his monument.

The 12 hectare grounds are as remarkable as the house. With a series of loggias, porticoes, piazzas and gardens, stuffed with war relics and props, he created a surreal landscape dominated by the huge grey hulk of a battle ship - the Puglia. The ship has been dug into the hillside, and the aft section recreated in stone so that it blends seemlessly into the garden.

The moment when you come upon the towering prow nosing between cypresses, as if the ship is steaming silently toward the lake below, is one that stays with you.

Even the mausoleum, where d’Annunzio’s remains lie in a Roman sarcophagus elevated 20 ft above the ground on a white stone column and surrounded by his greatest chums, all on top of smaller columns, does not top the Puglia.

Amongst those who surround this supreme performance artist is Gian Carlo Maroni, the architect who turned his visions into reality. Maroni was to live for 20 years after the poet’s death. As a spirtualist, he claimed to be receiving regular spirit messages from d’Annunzio which enabled him to continue with the great work, including adding an amphitheatre in which his plays are now regularly performed and, coincidentally, keeping himself in gainful employment.

Later, as I sat in the restaurant opposite the Vittoriale’s main gates and cut into my D’Annunzio pizza - with rocket and shaved parmesan topping - a German couple who I recognised from the tour of the house came and sat at the next table. We swapped impressions of d’Annunzio. But I didn’t mention the war once.





Factfile

Albergo Elena, 54 Via Gardesana, Assenza di Brenzone. Tel 045 6590015 / 7420074.

Villa Fiordaliso, 150 Corso Zanardelli, Gardone 0365 201 58. fax 290011.

Il Vittoriale, Gardone. tel 0365 20130. Gardens open daily from 8.30am until 8pm ( April to September) and from 9am until 12.30, then from 2pm until 5.30 (October to March). House open daily from 8.30am to 8pm (April to September), and from 9am to 12.30pm and from 2pm until 5.30 pm (October to March).