This study offers a new perspective on Italian nationalist culture before Fascism. Focusing especially on the extraordinary literary-political career of Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938), the book shows how literary critics and historians alike have failed to recognize links between the Italian writer and the protofascist «revolutionary right» or «conservative revolution» of France and Germany. Among the study's most significant topics are: the impact of D'Annunzian racial thinking and Orientalist writing in the evolution of Italian imperialism, conflicting responses of D'Annunzio and Thomas Mann to nationalist images of a regenerated Venice, and how André Gide refuses D'Annunzio's homoerotic nationalist cult.