Gabriele D'Annunzio.

It's no gods, no mares.

It's November.

I'm the mayor of this episode.

I'm joined by my co-mares, Matthian Riley.

Ahoy.

Hello.

And anytime I write about or think about the guy we're talking about today, I get slightly manic.

I get slightly carried up in it and with it, even though I know this is not a good thing to do.

So I hope we're excited for a very neurotypical episode of podcast today.

It's neurotypical gods, neurotypical mayors, as we were saying.

That's right.

As we talk about Gabriel Danuncio,

who a guy who would hate being described as a mayor.

It is the most venomous personal insult I could possibly deploy against him.

I found out that that's even more true than I thought when I was doing his biography for this.

And this is, it's a historical guy par excellence.

And for 16 months, he was in charge of the city of Fiume against the world.

And to me, that makes him a mayor.

And we're going to learn a lot about interwar Italian politics, proto-fascism, yoga.

Lenin shows up.

It's a good time.

Tremendous.

Does he ever eat a bowl of bolts in oil

Funny, you should mention.

Oh, good, good, good, good, good.

I'm ready.

I'm wearing my It's Fume or Nowhere sweatshirt that I bought for $300.

I have a little bowl of airplane washers sitting beside me that I'm just snacking on.

I'm draped in like a 50-foot Italian flag banner.

I'm clutching several daggers about various aspects of my person.

And I'm ready to talk about Denuncia.

C, see, see, see.

yep

I had my homeopathic FFS now as you can see from the bandage on my face the one bit of my face that got feminized yeah that's right yeah I was gonna say Riley you're looking very snatched but only one quadrant yeah

yeah yeah I they gave me like the one Kanti eyebrow yeah Riley went to his doctor and he said what can you do for me that will drive the two co-hosts of my podcast that are always trying to get me to transition uh into like a manic frothing insanity

And it was micro-dosing FFS.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I feel like we're losing track of the whole kind of like youth and vigor here.

So we need to move on to municipal roundup.

Sorry.

I was just going to say I could get like a tracheal shave, but by like half a millimeter.

Just

slightly less, you know, just because you like it.

My friend Danny Lavery once said to me recently that watching me transition was like watching someone try to open a piece of candy in the movie theater so slowly.

And Riley, I hate to be watching you do this as well.

Municipal Roundup.

All right.

My entry for municipal roundup is: I'm just going to play this drop.

I'm going to sit back and I'm just going to not react to it.

Congratulations.

You know, when Jesus was on the cross, he said, God, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

All these Negroes who are asking me to step down, God, forgive them.

Are you stupid?

Is it good when you have a solid 20 seconds of uninterrupted constituents yelling at you?

Yeah.

Were they yelling at him or were they yelling with him?

Well, see, this is a very denunciant question you're posing here.

And I think this is going to speak to a lot of the themes that we're going to draw out today.

Screaming to a lot of the themes, yeah.

Yeah.

This is also like, this happened to Adams.

And then like a couple of days later, which was I think two days ago now, we're recording this on the 28th.

He like straight up did not show up to a candidate forum.

Well, I mean, just as well.

Otherwise, he would have said some more things like that and just been yelled at.

Yeah.

Well, he was like, I can't come.

My lawyer says I can't go to the candidate forum and i think it might be sort of disqualifying for you to be the mayor of a city if you're not allowed to run for it and that's just one little bear's opinion i don't know

eric adams also uh they found a bunch of uh money uh again he's like going back for more corruption at this point for some why like why the not they found uh about 40 of the 7.5 million dollars reported uh as like his campaign war chest is not accounted for with finance paperwork.

Yeah, just like Jesus.

Yeah.

Most of that category is taken up by

cash, which is cool.

Just random cash that they don't know where it's from.

It's not accounted for.

Oh, from the money changes, I assume, when you turned over all of those tables.

He needs to be rendering it to Caesar.

I mean, I would love to see like a modern, like he's releasing Adam's coin and it's like to help you render unto Caesar.

You're like, what does that mean, Adam's coin?

I'm surprised he hasn't released a meme coin, to be perfectly honest.

That is kind of shocking.

I feel like if he gets back in the office, I think meme coin is like stop number one.

We never really found out what happened to him taking Bitcoin as his first paycheck.

Sorry, we did.

He did it twice, and then they told him he couldn't do it anymore.

That's right.

Correct Amundo.

It's like, no, we need to do a more like accountable and transparent way of paying your salary, like a bunch of like stacks of used bills that we're going to find in your freezer in like a year's time.

Yeah, look, we're paying you Montreal style where they just give you a sock full of money at the end of the month.

They just slide it over the table.

Good work this month.

Here's your sock.

I hate the first of every month where I have to go to the accountant's office at my office and to remove my shoe and wait for him to slip the sock full of money onto my foot.

This is also like after he was determined to no longer be allowed to get matching funding.

Because they're like, again, you're under investigation.

So he's like, great, I'll get around this by just getting a bunch of mystery funds.

From a secrets partner.

He's a cool guy.

Yeah, he's a cool guy.

And hey, it's fun that he's still in office, even though he doesn't have to be.

That's right.

Yeah.

You know what?

He's not a quitter.

You have to say that for him.

He's not a quitter.

I have one more municipal round of item that I'm not.

Jesus wasn't a quitter.

Sorry, Matty.

Go ahead.

No, no, Jesus was.

I mean, Jesus took a break, you could say.

He took a brief break for a couple.

Jesus, I'd love to hear.

The thing is, I think I wish Eric Adams would be called upon to

justify things more.

Well, I mean, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he saw all human sin and then chose to die for it.

That's right.

This is great because this is going to come out two days into Lent.

So it's like extra blasphemous.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to God slam dunking my soul into hell like a basketball.

Straight down.

Doesn't even touch the sides, you know, no no net movement whatsoever just yeah got gone through a buzzer beater with november's soul into hell

i i listen i'm against the shot clock as an institution anyway so

you're against the shot clock yeah i'm against the shot clock

you want to see some basketball games that are 14 to 12

is that what you'd like

Yes, and they should go back to the peach basket.

I've got a great new basketball strategy for this new version of no-shot clock basketball, which is whichever team scores first then just holds onto the ball and like dogpiles over it.

Riley,

stop making fun of my insane retro rules application of basketball.

That's what they used to fucking do, is they would get a lead and then people would just hold on to the ball.

Yeah, it's cool.

I think that the Toronto Raptors should retool their team to have like an offensive line of really fast, tall guys, and then a defensive line of the biggest guys in Toronto who are just going to dogpile the ball.

That's right.

All right.

I have one more guy before we move into our guy for the episode, which is a very brief one is I'm going to take everybody to London, Kentucky.

Hey.

Where

this is a very brief one, but

the mayor of London, Kentucky, Randall Weddell, which is a great name that I love.

I'm just going to read from an article here in Lexington Herald leader.

The public fight began late last year when three residents, brothers John, James, Phelps, and Elijah Jarvis, were critical of the city after police shot and killed 63-year-old Doug Hartless while trying to serve a warrant for stolen property.

And in light of all the criticism this guy has been catching, he held a preference conference saying that the city, the people that were after him were an organized gang of pedophiles.

Oh my God, local QA?

Okay, that, I mean, that's a good, that's a gambit.

And I think I prefer it to comparing yourself to Jesus, to be honest, to be like,

okay, yeah, maybe we shot the guy, but have you considered?

What if that guy was a pedophile?

Then you wouldn't feel so bad, would you?

I have been standing here for four years trying to fight a corrupt system down here that has been controlled by a pedo clan.

So they're one family.

So it's like, it's like

he's like, I've been doing a true detective style sort of plot beat down here, and you didn't even notice when you were electing me as mayor that that was what I was going to be doing.

Yeah.

Weddell then is a, I think a rebuke to this podcast specifically went on a different podcast called the True Crime Cast and accused the brothers, the two brothers of the three, of sex trafficking, drug dealing, and murder.

I don't think we can have him on this podcast, which is a shame.

Like our first mayor guest to just do a bunch of like unsupported local QAnon allegations would be a very funny bit for us.

I think we can say he is a guest.

He is here.

He's just not said anything yet.

In spirit, much like Eric Adams.

I forgot that every time we are talking about a mayor, they are technically a guest of the episode.

They They are in the third mic.

Their camera is on.

We're looking at them.

Every three to four minutes, they simply...

Fourth mic.

Sorry.

Which of us is being ridden by the spirit of the mayor of London, Kentucky?

Eyes turn completely black.

You know what it is?

I think

the spirit of Mr.

Weddell in London, Kentucky is being ridden by Fedsmoker.

I think Fedsmoker has descended from heaven, where he was, by the way.

He has risen.

He flew down on angel wings, and then the mayor of London, Kentucky, who was otherwise going to be a normal guy, who was just going to be like, hey, I'm here to cut the ribbons and wave hello to the babies.

And, you know, hey, maybe we can build that new sports center.

He got through the second sentence before Fedsmoker with his little harp flew in.

He descended upon him.

And he started snarling and calling people Chomos.

Yeah,

and then he was like, first of all, everyone, everybody this town is a fucking chomo

fed smoker possession a very a very like dangerous phenomenon

yeah but it's it fundamentally it's a just one which is why fed smoker is in heaven right like

he's at god's right hand uh getting fired out of a gun into people's bodies

ist sprechlich right like every angel is terrifying and that includes fed smoker fed smoker was only ever an angel.

He was never like a normal guy.

Well, that was municipal roundup, everybody.

Thanks for coming.

I did really like, though, that like one of the three brothers, like, was a Chomo.

Like, one of the three brothers.

Actually, one of the three brothers.

He was right.

So, no, one of the three brothers was a Chomo, who pled guilty to possession of child pornography.

Oh, okay.

And he heard that, and he was like, this is a heritable trait, I assume.

So he was like, All right, I bet I'm going to roll the dice that I'm going to be able to discredit the other two brothers.

Who are, by the way,

Kentucky State Troopers.

Beautiful.

I mean, that kind of led, that's a thumb on the scale in favor of pedophilia, surely.

But also, like, what I, the, um, like, the, the mayor also has, like, a, a sort of an enabling lawyer who's just like who's basically is like who you know has like i'm willing to hear this guy out is the thing yeah the the photo of him and the lawyer is just really outstanding i'm going to put it in the in the show notes on patreon

okay yeah because they're standing in front of like a big sort of like flagstone fireplace with a small catering table yeah like doing doing like the kind of like bust photo that cops do when they've seized a bunch of drugs it's also my i love it when two people are next to each other that are different scales.

Like they don't look like one's taller than the other.

It looks like one's been scaled up in Photoshop.

It's cool.

At time of recording, the mayor's lawyer has just given the plaintiffs, the two brothers, the non, not known to be Chomo brothers, an ultimatum, basically saying that the mayor will

come, will basically do a parade if they don't, if they, by like by today, by day of recording, says drop the lawsuits today or the mayor will do a parade with all of the alleged victims of the other two brothers that he says are chomo.

It feels inappropriate to do a kind of like anti-Chomo parade.

Like

a victim-focused parade, victim-led parade.

So the lawyer said, if this case is still pending past 5 p.m.

tomorrow, we are all going down the rabbit hole and we're going to find everything that's in it.

Oh, my God.

You know, people say they, you know, as an abolitionist, people argue with you and they they say, what will you do, right, for victim justice?

And the answer is, of course, a shame parade.

The shame parade.

The shame parade.

Yeah, I think that's clear.

My favorite MCR album.

So, like,

let's see.

Let's see.

Yeah, let's keep an eye on London, Kentucky.

Let's see what's going on with the parade situation there.

Well, by the time it comes out, by the time this comes out, the parade will have either happened or not.

Like Elon Musk fighting Zuckerberg, the parade keeps getting like pushed back for various flimsy excuses.

Oh, it was there was a 20% chance of rain.

We couldn't have the parade today.

There was a double booking on Main Street.

It was going to be the

orphan dogs awareness week.

We couldn't have the parade today.

The orphan dogs have remarkable size and strength.

Okay, that's enough.

Municipal roundup.

Hiya.

Goodbye.

Hi-yah.

November, tell me about your guy.

Beautiful.

Beautiful municipal for roundup.

Thank you.

So we got to go back to pre-war Italy and specifically we have to go back to 1863

when this guy Gabriel D'Annunzio was born in Pescara in Abruzza and he becomes a poet, right?

But the one crucial detail that I fished out of his early biography is that his dad was a former mayor of Pescara who was known for like drunkenness and debauchery.

So the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, you you know, like father like son, like mayor like mayor.

Mayor is a heritable trait.

Yeah.

Yes, yes.

I must, I'm, I, I have this drive, even though I reject the mayorness of my father, I have a drive to wield power over a locality.

I don't want your life, but he's talking about being a mayor.

Yeah, you try and like distance yourself from your father only to find that in time you've become more like him than if you just accepted it.

This is, this is the tragedy of mayorship, you know?

But so he can write is the thing.

And he becomes a poet, becomes a novelist, all of that.

Of a very kind of like heterodox bent, he ends up in France for a while writing an opera about Saint Sebastian with Debussy.

And he insists that the whole thing be set to music, which means it's like five hours long.

So everybody hates it.

He tried to do an Italian ring cycle.

Basically, yeah.

Like, never has any money, is always kind of like popular and like a socialite, has a lot of affairs with women, is very like flashy, but is always like one step ahead of his creditors.

Um, and has this whole kind of literary life that is otherwise, you know, untroubled until Italy is drawn into World War I.

And like a lot of Italian intellectuals, this is a guy who loves the war, loves the concept of the war.

Um, he does a bunch of like speeches in favor of it, one of which he actually kind of prefigures effective altruism.

He does a kind of like parody Sermon on the Mount in which he says,

oh, blessed be those who have more, for more will they be able to give, which gives you a sense of the guy.

And ultimately, he's able to not just cheerlead the war, but get into it and get his war on himself.

And this is a 52-year-old man.

in horrible health with no military experience.

But he has pull.

And so he's able to get himself into a cavalry regiment.

And then he just kind of like floats around the war in between like the army and the navy and the air force, just doing whatever he wants because the Italian army is not that serious and nobody's really that minded to stop him.

That's great.

So he is, he is able to have, he's the only person in World War I for whom World War I was kind of what everyone thought it would be, like a kind of a fun, adventurous romp.

Yeah, Yeah, he's not the only one, but he's definitely one of a few.

And he becomes a war hero of his own making.

He does these kind of theatrical stunts.

One of the things that he does is he

takes a biplane and flies low over Vienna and drops these like poetic leaflets that he's written himself.

about like the bravery of the Italian people and how like the Austro-Hungarians are all pussies who couldn't do that.

I'm finding that

mayor-ness is sort of co-terminal with posting, which is really fascinating and maybe what's drawing us to the sort of

posting.

This is posting.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

He does this again.

I think at one point he bombs Trieste with like leaflets first and then comes back in the afternoon and drops some actual bombs.

He loses an eye in a flying accident and everyone, he doesn't tell anyone that it was an accident.

So everyone just kind of assumes for the rest of his life that he lost it in combat.

Oh, this is, this is, this is so redolent of so many modern valor borrowers.

Like, I'm immediately reminded of Madison Cawthorne, the representative who

is slightly too embarrassing to be allowed to continue to have a job, who just let people assume, because he's very pro-troop, that he

was paralyzed.

Yeah, he was paralyzed in war as opposed to in a car, drunk driving accident.

yeah exactly exactly um and so that this kind of like cult this narrative around denuncio springs up of him sort of like uh like charging austrian trenches in the middle of the night with pistol and knives uh dressed in a cape which is like almost certainly false he spent most of the war like socializing but he's the stories are generated he is not is you say he's a poster i think he's a very specific type of poster

he's a forum poster he is not a social media poster.

Yes, yeah.

There is a kind of like absolute self-belief and sincerity about him, which is

gets to the heart of all of this.

It's sort of like self-mythologizing his forum poster to the core, I feel.

He's supposed to have at one point sailed a torpedo boat into the Austrian fleet at anchor and blown up one of their ships, but he also suffered for years from extreme seasickness.

And nobody in Italy took those two facts, including functionally his biographer I'm very uh like dependent here on a book called D'Annunzio the first duce by an American Enterprise Institute guy called Michael Ledin who absolutely finds no dissonance between these two facts of a naval war hero and crippling seasickness.

Okay, well, then you have to admit that it would be much harder to do that incredible thing, which is just more impressive to me.

Because the whole time he's got like the barf bag out and he's blowing up an entire fleet at anchor.

That's impressive.

Yeah.

The fact that he was and the fact that he was able to do that while maintaining a good flow to his cape the whole time suggests that we all should start affairs with him immediately.

Yeah.

Of course.

Gabrielle.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, everyone else is having like a horrible, like actual First World War war.

And in particular,

I really recommend the book M Son of the Century by Antonio Scoratti for this,

who gets into exactly how the fascist movement depended on

these special forces groups, the Arditi,

who were doing sort of like horrible things because in general, the distribution of a kind of like

a front in a war in World War I was like 90 out of 100 guys are just like bakers, right, who have been conscripted.

They don't want to be there, but they want to be in like military prison less.

And then the other 10 guys are the guys with whom something is like wrong.

And those guys love killing.

Those are your like Ernst Junger, kind of like Storm of Steel kind of guys.

And they used those separately to do things like trench raids.

There's a kind of like mix of like death and killing and homo-sociality and like male nakedness.

All of these guys are like.

completely like pathologically shirtless all the time.

They're like diving into the Piave River, like covered in mud, completely naked with a knife between their teeth to climb out and like stab Austrians.

And this creates this kind of like hyper-patriotic, hyper-nationalist in-group of guys who really think that

like if you didn't fight in the war, your life isn't worth living.

And if you didn't fight in the Arditi with them, you didn't fight, right?

It's like,

this is the kind of recruiting ground for the Freikorps in Germany.

And in Italy, these guys are called Arditi.

And at the end of the war, they're all kind of at a loss because they loved killing, and now they don't get to do it anymore.

Yeah, I mean, it does.

I've alluded to this already in the episode, but November knows very well that I think that one of the funniest people to ever live in history is the poet Marinetti, the Italian futurist.

Yeah, Filippo Tomasu Marinetti.

For so, so, so many reasons.

One of which is all he wanted from his whole life, once he found out that there were Arditi, was for them to like him.

Yes.

And he dedicate, and there were people who would like, it wasn't just these guys, there were people in Italy who dedicated themselves to worshiping at the cult of these guys who hated them.

Yes, and this is the thing.

The one curious exception to this was D'Anuncio.

He had never been an Ardito.

He had never done any of this stuff, but they loved him.

Like this, this sort of like self-mythologizing, short, bald,

repulsively ugly man with like notoriously bad teeth.

All of these guys who had done nothing but like stab Austrian conscript or war looked at this guy who had like crashed one plane one time and were like, oh, I will die for you, sir.

He was their Trump.

Yeah, I mean, he, an eye patch does look pretty cool, I will say, in his defense.

I think it's a really easy way to get people on side when you've got an eye patch.

And they loved him.

He was like an honorary Ardito.

He's sort of like adopting some of their customs.

Like their unit patch was like a black flame.

And he started adopting that too.

Italy wins the war.

And if you remember GCSE history, it kind of gets shafted at the, you know, the Treaty of Versailles, right?

Because in order to like join the war, they had signed the Treaty of London, which promised them a bunch of stuff in North Africa and the Adriatic, right?

No, no, I'm not super up on World War I.

Italy was neutral and got dragged into it, right?

Was the idea?

Yeah, Italy, Italy joined the Allies in exchange for this promise of like territory, basically.

And then all of a sudden, when the war was won, Americans were very into like self-determination and like, no, we don't to do that, right?

Also, Woodrow Wilson was like, I don't think you guys are fully human.

Yeah, nobody liked Italians.

And the Italians had spent the war building up this conception of like Italian virtue and manhood and honor.

And they're like, the war is not just not just like a stage, but a kind of redemptive blood sacrifice.

So like all of the youth of Italy, and that's the reason why the fascist song is an old Arditi song called Giovanezza, youth, right?

Is all of the kind of youth and beauty of Italy is like sort of sacrificing itself for honor and renown and a kind of like status.

And meanwhile, you look at, you know, Wilson looks at this and the ice cream guys?

The like organ grinder monkey guys?

No, get the fuck out of there.

Woodrow Wilson is just like, what are they like more closely related to spaniels than humans?

Like, what do we

like?

Like, what species are these things?

Yeah, their food has too much garlic in it.

it, and that in this time is considered disgusting for some reason.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so, like, Denuncio is a big part of the mythology around the end of the war.

If you've heard the phrase mutilated victory, that's one of his.

This idea that Italy was being betrayed in victory, right?

Because all of the stuff that they were supposed to get out of the war was just being handed off to like Yugoslavs, effectively.

Yeah, Woodrow Wilson was like,

I guess those guys are, are they more related to like Labradors?

Those are better than Spaniels, I guess.

Let's get the more noble dog.

The French were pro-Yugoslav as well, because they thought it was like, you know, balance of power stuff.

The British didn't really care.

And there's this one city, Fiume,

which is, it's a city on the Adriatic, so like east of Italy across the water.

And it was technically part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but because the Austro-Hungarian Empire is weird, it was administered as like an exclave of Hungary.

And it was this kind of like backwater port.

And it was kind of its ethnic makeup was like you have Hungarian Aristos.

They imported this kind of client Italian bourgeoisie that made up about like half of the actual city.

And then all the manual labor was done by Croatians who like mostly commuted in.

Right.

And all of these guys had been like variously at each other's throats over nationalism, stuff like, you know, they open a school that, you know, teaches in Croatian for the first time and the Italians riot, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But it's a nice city.

It's like weirdly progressive and heterodox in a lot of ways.

One thing that Ladine's book cites for this is that it had indoor plumbing as early as 1912.

So it's nice compared to Italy.

But so Austro-Hungarian Empire collapses.

The Hungarians are like, all right, it's cooked.

It's over.

Just leave.

And the Croatians and the Italians are the two like national groups left.

And the big decision is whether this city is going to be Italian or Yugoslav.

Yeah.

Which a hard question considering the entire city is in the middle of Yugoslavia.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But on the other hand, if you're Italian, you're like, it's like 49% Italian if you don't count any of the suburbs.

And you super promised.

You literally promised.

It's like, well, we didn't get to keep any of the North Africa territories.

We At least there's this one part of southern Europe that has indoor plumbing, and you're saying we can't keep it.

Yeah, exactly.

And so the city gets occupied by the Allies.

And like I say, the French are pro-Yugoslav.

The Italians are pro-Italian.

There are some like scattered gunfights between peacekeepers.

But ultimately, the Italians finagle this.

So it's just Italian troops occupying the city while they sort out the peace assessment, which takes years.

And the fumans fucking love this.

They go on this like charm offensive to try and win over the troops which is a pretty easy sell because fume is like you don't have a shit outdoors

it's by the adriatic so it's very pretty love it

and it's crucially it's famous like culturally for little tiny cakes and caramels okay okay maybe i'm thinking that we should try to what if we tried to make fume an exclave of something because i could really i could go for that what if we made fume an exclave of this podcast oh so like you're you're like a sardinian regiment of grenadiers the war's over

nobody's nobody's shooting at you apart from like one french guy and every so often the most beautiful woman you've ever seen is like here is a fresh zaballion you know uh please please enjoy this please fall in love with my city yeah if you're also thinking about like the sort of war-ravaged impoverish because like the the other thing is that the unif it's we've talked about the unification of italy actually twice in the last few episodes because that also was included in talking about the Lateran Treaty.

Yeah, I'm a

big believer in the One Italy policy.

Yeah.

The other sort of thing to remember as a piece of background to this is that the unification of Italy was in many ways like the national project that wasn't.

It never

created, and this is like what so many, this is what like people like Marinetti were reacting against, which is like, we have this nation, and yet we're still have all this lassitude, we're still undeveloped, we're still not mechanized, we have not rocketed into the future.

Well, as well, like, if you're, if you're like a maps guy, if you're an Italian irredentist, you don't think of Italy as being just like the boot, right?

You think Italy includes Dalmatia, it includes that bit around the Adriatic that includes Fiume and like a bunch of stuff that's now Croatia.

Yeah, I mean, it definitely includes Fiume now that I'm done getting gassed and I'm eating a beautiful cake on a toilet.

yeah and i i should also say italian politics at this time and also every subsequent time is mostly about scheming

and so you have i wonder if anyone ever makes a board game about that curious probably not Yeah, so you have this whole right wing that's like deeply disillusioned by the peace settlement that is constantly scheming about, hey, maybe what if we've already got like troops there?

The Yugoslavs are kind of a joke.

What if we just take the whole territory?

What if we we just take Dalmatia?

But the Americans won't let them.

And so.

What are we going to do?

Let a Spaniel administer a city?

That's crazy talk.

It's Dalmatians over there.

It's crazy.

So at the Paris Peace Conference, the Italians agree sort of provisionally to cede Fiume to Yugoslavia.

They switch out these Sardinian grenadiers and the Fiumans make a whole production of this.

There's like beautiful women throwing themselves at their feet, weeping as they're marching out.

There's kids like hanging onto their arms and legs, like, you know, don't betray us and our beautiful cakes to the barbarous Croatian.

It's like the parent trap.

Yeah, kind of.

And of course, this works.

And so they march out of town.

They get to the first next town, which is a little town called Ronki, and they just stop.

right and they disobey their their orders and a bunch of the officers write to Gabriel D'Annuncio.

There's just a chain of children holding hands to ankles all the way back to Fume.

But not another child.

They're getting to Ronchi.

And so the poor fucking Sardinian officer is just trying to write, and there's a kid hanging off his arm.

You forgot to do a cake, mister.

So kids are just, there's kids running, the smallest kids are running up and down the human bridge formed by the bigger kids to just do a bucket chain of like cakes, cakes, tiny cakes.

So they write to D'Annunzio to be like, please come and like take command of us and just seize the city.

Zione D'Annunzio, my country yearns for freedom.

Literally, yes.

Also,

it's like they're writing to the guy.

I think the important thing to remember as well is they're writing to the guy whose main thing he ever did was like go and pretend to be a war hero at parties.

Yes.

Yes.

They are writing to a pretend war hero being like, it's like chicken run it's fucking heartbreaking it's like oh we know you're like so good at war so like if you come in with us that nobody's gonna fuck with us yeah it's fucking the seven samurai yeah yeah and so denuncio for like reasons that I think are now obvious is like I don't want to right and yeah oh oh I hurt my back I would totally do it but I can't right now does claim to get sick the day before the plot is supposed to go

Which, by the way, he twists that so when he does end up taking the city, it's like, and he rose miraculously from his sick bed.

This is me, you set expectations low.

He did

him having a hurt tummy was like, has probably saved his life before.

So he gets like,

it's just, it is so funny to get like the cappingest guy in pre-war Italy to be like, hey, you, you used to like, you know, slaughter entire village fulls of like Austrian conscripts with just like with this.

You're basically Italian John Wick, as far as we're concerned.

You're Italian Master Chief.

Please come and like liberate.

Can you please come and like, we'll just watch if you want to single-handedly liberate Fiume from Yugoslavia.

Yeah, and meanwhile, he's in Venice just like, ooh, shit.

Okay.

Would you call him the copy the tuti copy?

So another thing about the

good.

Even if he weren't kind of lying about being a war hero, right?

He's also like pathologically indecisive.

He's this weird mystic.

He loves to claim to look for like hidden signs before doing stuff.

So when they come to him with this plot, he's like,

this date is really like inauspicious for me, like five times

before he can't weasel out of it anymore.

And it's so funny to me that they're like, okay, he knows the dates.

He wouldn't have

all the war hero stories he told, they were all on auspicious dates.

So we just need to wait.

And that actually he picks the date of the like supposed torpedo boat thing for this because he thinks it's auspicious.

Okay, he has OCD guys.

That's all it is.

I got this too.

It's the same thing.

He can't come because he forgot to turn the light switch on a couple of times before he left the house.

He's also a huge tarot guy.

So he's like, so the cards have to tell him it's a good idea.

This is, by the way, the kind of of guy who writes everything with a quill.

So yeah.

But finally,

he can't put them off anymore.

And so he ends up going out there with like a thousand Arditi who are all like, kill, kill, kill, kill.

And so he just rolls up.

And every checkpoint that he gets to, the troops are just like, yeah, fuck it.

I'll join that guy.

He's Italian Master Chief.

He's a war hero.

So so at no point is he ever called upon to demonstrate martial arts

there is not a shot fired in the course of taking this city right like the the the italian general who's in command of it comes out and tries to stop him and he just gets up and uh scorati says he's in like a bright red sports car at the head of a column of like a thousand people and he like tears open his shirt where he's got his gold war medal over his chest and he's like all you got to do is shoot me and And of course, they all like desert to that makes perfect sense, though, because he's like, once he sees people buying his lie, then he just gets more and more and more encouraged.

Yeah, also, shooting him probably wouldn't even do anything, he would probably bounce off.

He's so strong,

and so they drive into the city.

Also, sorry, sorry, last thing before we go on: the fact that he's,

I am imagining he is standing on a bright red sports car and having torn his shirt open.

He is like a,

he is like a southern European music video from the 1990s.

But like instead of a ripped Fabio guy, it's this like tiny bald

teeth.

And so they enter the city.

It's called the sacred entrance, right?

There's a film that every woman in the city is like there and like cheering and armed as well because Fioman women had gotten the vote before Italian ones and they were all quite organized and radical.

They run out of flowers to throw at him.

Quickly start picking tulips.

I see a snowdrop there.

He goes to the palace, he unfurls this big flag, which is the war flag of his dead buddy, Giovanni Randaccio, who had died in the war.

He's like, one of his big things during speeches is like, do you honor this bloody flag or whatever?

And he waves this giant flag around and he says, Italians of Fiume, in the mad and cowardly war, Fiume today is the symbol of liberty.

In the mad and cowardly world, there is a single pure element, Fiume.

There is a single truth, and this is Fiume.

Fiome is like a blazing searchlight that radiates in the midst of an ocean of objection.

And then he goes and collapses.

And he's kind of thinking,

okay, well, great, good job, right?

Yeah,

I'm going to go back to like lying and having affairs in

the Italian peninsula.

One of the guys, one of the actual fumans, a guy called Host Venturi, wakes him up and is like, they have put you in charge of the city.

While you were asleep.

Yeah.

The Italian council have elected him commandante.

He didn't, he thought he was just going to do the speech and leave, right?

But instead, they have made him dictator.

Sir, we've made you Mussolini Zero.

You have to wake up.

Yes.

Yes.

And he really didn't want to do it.

Nobody wanted him to do it.

One of my favorite details about this is a telegram from the U.S.

ambassador in Rome writing home about this, saying, Oh, well, we assume he's just going to kill himself.

Literally, the phrase is: choose some sensational way out of the situation, such as a melodramatic attempt at suicide.

I love that.

Unseal the hushed pasta show.

We We need Master Chief to cover you.

But so the Italians surround the city.

They don't trust their own troops to attack it because all of the soldiers and officers are like, this is a hero, right?

He has to announce that he's not taking defections anymore because he has too many.

This has now happened a couple times with him, it seems, where like he tries, he really doesn't want to be put in a position of like like power authority danger or whatever but whenever it is it impossible to avoid he does say fuck it and go full tilt yeah he what he orders in a crystal vase full of flowers and a silver goblet full of chocolates who wouldn't to be fair if i'm ever made mayor of somewhere that's the first thing i'm doing

Pietro Badoglio, the Italian commander opposite him, lists the troops that D'Annunzio has under his command and is like, there are no others because he didn't want any more.

He sent back an entire battalion that defected to him.

I love this guy being like making up stories about how he's the most like incredible guy to ever live.

And then every time someone's like, yeah, we agreed, he's like, get out of here.

You shouldn't talk.

Don't listen to me.

It's the most risked up man in history.

He's so afraid of success.

So all of the guys he'd been scheming with back in Italy, including Mussolini, to whom D'Annuncio is kind of a cross between like John the Baptist and idiot younger brother who won't give you the Xbox controller.

They're just kind of leaving him out on a limb.

D'Anuncio is writing to Mussolini, like, hey, what the fuck, right?

I became mayor by mistake.

Please help me.

He tells him to try deflating his own stomach because he's too like, like, puffed up, right?

There's no economic activity because the whole city's blockaded.

Everyone's still partying.

The U.S.

vice consul, three weeks into the occupation, writes, the city is completely beflagged.

It looks like a town in which the people have nothing to do because of the continuous demonstrations.

I mean, that's definitely going to prove some of Woodrow Wilfrid's theories about Italians.

Yeah, specifically.

It kind of gets worse, right?

Because the first big event that they have is a double funeral.

There are these two pilots, Bini and Zeppeno.

They take off on a reconnaissance flight over the city.

Engine fails.

They crash.

Zeppeno gets impaled on a cast iron fence.

It's pretty nasty, right?

But these are the first two deaths for the city of Fiome.

And he just kind of uses these to animate some more politics.

He starts like, he does this huge funeral procession.

He starts calling Fiome.

And this is something that has, I think, is one of the preeminent examples of something that has not aged well, right?

You know how I mentioned this thing, this recurring theme of like

Italian like manhood and blood sacrifice.

The thing that Italian erodentists called this at the time was the Holocaust, right?

Like this idea that like getting killed in the war was like an offering to redeem Italy, right?

And so he starts calling Fiume the city of the Holocaust.

That's his like name for it.

Cool.

This is all very like Roman sounding to me, like ancient Roman.

I love so much for him to to be like, I don't know what I'm doing here.

I really don't like it very much.

And the second two guys die, you're like on the patio of your palace, like screaming fire and blood.

Literally, yes, he has them buried together as, and I quote, a young, winged, and sworn couple, and then the city runs out of flowers again.

God, you know, if you ever want, if you want to make money, don't take over a city in Croatia for the Italians.

Grow flowers when the Italians die.

Also, I like that the

just to remember that, like, at the end of all of that,

that it was an accident.

Yes, yeah, they died for like no reason, and it didn't matter.

Um, no one even shot at them or anything.

Um, so meanwhile, the Arditi are just like fucking anything that moves, doing every drug imaginable.

So, it's Italian Fort Bragg, it's Fort Braggadocchio.

Very good.

One of his guys is this guy called Guido Keller.

He had been a fighter ace

and was now a kind of like a professional Ardito, right?

And so he puts Keller in charge of something he calls the Office of Armed Coups.

And

in order to just get these guys out of the city, they start doing like pirate raids.

um just like into yugoslavia or like against italian shipping for supplies and this works so well that the economy is,

it's kind of a joke, but it sort of works.

Nobody's starving.

Wait, so what we're saying is that Fiume was probably the first

pirate city outside the Caribbean in a while.

Yes.

Okay.

I want to say some more shit about Keller because he's one of the weirder dudes here.

Very into yoga.

Very into swastikas in a mystical way.

Habitual nudist, including before the war, he got arrested a bunch of times in Genoa for just walking around with his cock out.

Had like a lot of gay sex with his own men, had a pet eagle whom DeNuncio kidnapped once as a prank.

That doesn't seem like who you want to prank.

Well, because he loved the guy, and like he, he, he used to just like rusticate himself out of the city and go and sleep on a haystack with his men.

Sure.

I have a story here, and this is from, again, the first

In October, for example, Keller took off on a surveillance flight over nearby Yugoslav territory.

The engine of his plane failed, and as he floated down slowly over a broad plain, he saw a set of buildings beneath him with a spacious field in their midst.

He landed his aircraft in the field and discovered that he had set down in a monastery, and the monks leaned out of their cells to shout at him in a language he did not understand.

In a few hours, he managed to repair his plane, but in the meantime had found a miniature donkey in the field and become fond of it.

it was that when Keller flew back to Fiume, he had a tiny donkey lashed to the struts of his landing gear and he gave the animal to the Commandante.

What's okay?

This didn't happen, right?

This is all a thing that you made up.

I don't know.

The whole double story is this city does not exist.

There's actually no such thing as Italy.

This can't be real.

He's flying around with a tiny donkey strapped to his fucking World War I red baron-ass plane.

November, You expect me to believe that he's flying around with a donkey tied to a plane that he a donkey he found that he stole from monks in a language in a country where he doesn't understand what they're speaking?

A country that doesn't exist?

Monks that aren't real.

Remember?

It gets worse.

It gets so much worse.

I do like the idea that

when he lands back in Fumee, the donkey's got to make sure its hooves are moving like a Flintstones car

becomes part of the landing gear.

So he's not a very like vengeful dictator, is Denuncia.

Well, he's got this beautiful donkey to calm him.

Yeah, exactly.

So like

people keep getting like convicted for things and he just pardons them for anything for any reason, including treason.

Well, yeah, because he's so indecisive.

He'd just be like,

oh,

please,

Ilduche V1.0, this guy was coming in here with a gun to kill you, to restore the sovereignty of Fume to the Egoslavs.

And he was like, I don't know.

Turn him loose.

Don't do it again.

I flipped a coin and it said to keep him alive.

I don't know.

There's this strange mimesis that occurs.

People start dressing like him.

Officers start wearing white gloves and perfume and eating chocolates.

People start.

Sorry, I want to say, they don't,

because I have the notes in front of me.

They don't just start eating chocolates.

They are eating chocolates out of silver goblets like he does.

this is like a fucking uh like a dancing plague has taken over the city or like the the it was just was this like another fungus issue like with the bread had gone bad

it's not so much a dancing plague as like a as a being cool plague there's there's there's a he makes this belgian musicologist and poet into his foreign secretary this guy called leon koznitsky um and he recalls hearing himself and realizing that he was talking like Dennuncio when he had to say like four months and he just naturally said like 120 days and 120 nights.

Everyone developed a million flourishes is what you're saying.

I mean, this is all of us talking like Trump for 20 minutes an episode.

Yeah, yeah.

Everyone is fucking everyone.

DeNuncio preposterously claims that, and this is a quote, from the moment I arrived in Fiume, I have maintained a Franciscan chastity, which is not true.

His main girlfriend is this concert pianist and Keller gets so jealous of her, he tries to like plot to kidnap her and like maroon her on a desert island.

This prank war is getting out of hand, I have to say.

All right, guys,

social experiment.

What happens?

Speaking of priestly chastity, at one point a bunch of like local monks try and secede from the church for their right to get married.

Oh, wow.

Yes.

To each other, I I hope?

I think to women, sadly, but like they like throw out this banner with we will remain here splendidly, which is one of D'Annuncio's lines.

But he like washes his hands of it because he's very indecisive.

He leaves it as the church's problem.

You do wish that he would have taken up that cause, you know, just being like, yeah, all right, let's do a third Protestant Reformation.

Why not?

Monks should marry.

Okay, sure.

I'm adding that into, it's in the constitution of what I'm now calling party town Italy, which is the name of the city.

And

he's still hoping that the Italian government's just going to take the city.

But the Italian prime minister, Francesco Severian Nitti, he like prevails, he was like, prevaricates, he like stalls.

He's waiting for the next election.

It's in the Bay of Pigs, basically.

It is in

down to the idea of the...

sort of like psycho war hero exiles who are like going in and seizing the city.

It's like if they'd seized a territory and held it.

Yeah, because like there's no

economy because of the blockade, but also there's like people aren't starving.

So Denuncio just kind of like howls about how the infants are starving and he sends all the children in the city back to Italy to make Nietzsche look bad.

What he's doing is he's creating hedonism.

Yeah, kind of.

Also, he starts calling Nitti Kagoya, which is kind of like this untranslatably foul shit creature.

Like a shit elemental yeah meanwhile the the city economy which is predominantly pirate based is collapsing on its own and i have a long quote what no come on what

this is this is a kind of sarcastic uh like satirical magazine thing from the time the money that has free circulation in fiome is that with the new seal chita di fiome stamped on the notes which had the old stamp with the same words on it however these bills for the convenience of the public are rarely found in circulation The purpose of this measure is to avoid problems for the people.

Thus, the money that actually circulates is Yugoslav.

Here a distinction must be made.

Some of the notes are good, others are false.

To tell the difference, one needs simply look at them.

The bills with no seals stamped on them are not good, but they can be used nonetheless.

Those of a thousand crowns are good, but nobody wants them.

Those with the Hungarian seal are sometimes accepted, sometimes not.

Some of those with the Croatian seal are good, some are false, others are somewhat false.

And then there are the Czechoslovakian notes, then those of the new Yugoslavia, which are nearly official and which circulate very well, then the Styrian Corinthian ones, then those with the red Austro-German seal, those depend on the day of the week.

Okay, it seems like a really unstressed seal.

It's like, what is everyone waking up from their like nine-day hangover at this point?

Yeah, pretty much.

So Nietzsche stalls until the elections, in which he does very well.

And the kind of the calculation here is people are going to to get bored of d'nuncio d'nuncio is going to get bored of himself and that sort of happens but not yet though because he does some more scheming uh firstly with the italian admiral garrisoned in dalmatia but also with bits of the left the italian like dock workers union capture and send him a ship full of guns called the persia and

from this he does this kind of paroxysmal shift leftwards in which he starts talking about how, you know, instead of Italian manhood, it's like the cause of the world begins in Fiume and like it, it reconciles the gospel and the Quran.

Look, he had so many opportunities to really push the religious thing,

and I feel like he left it on the table.

What he does is he puts Koshnitsky, this

like Belgian musicologist, in charge of founding a parallel League of Nations called the League of Fiume, which is kind of like a non-aligned movement

this is a disaster by the way just to be

at work who was gonna be who was gonna be in it well

so the irish

um the the egyptians

possibly some everyone who wanted out of yugoslavia okay

this this annoys keller so much he forms something called the centurions of death and then takes them all off to do like uh to drill with each other with live ammunition in a barn in the countryside he shoots up he gets so mad he shoots a barn into non-existence yeah

meanwhile the soviet union sends one guy called engineer vodovosov who sends lenin's compliments as a revolutionary and a box of caviar and then tells them yeah we want nothing to do with you yeah you're too weird you you're not communist not only that but like they don't even want to risk alienating the Italian government by meeting with them formally.

And like all of the Italian socialists were all against the war, so they all hated Dennunzi for being pro-war.

Yeah.

And it's also, you know, it's, I think, a very subtle insult that the caviar was not in a silver goblet, his preferred way of eating.

It's in a box.

Look, I just think, I just think it doesn't matter

whether it's done it's Dennunzio in Fiume or BSW in Germany.

There is a place for socially conservative, economically liberal politics.

So

there's this whole drama around the League of Fiume where Koshnitsky, he has these meetings.

Some of them are stupid, some of them are serious.

He sends 250,000 rifles to Egypt, just kind of in case they needed them.

I'm giving you a quarter million rifles just to hold.

Yeah.

How do they have a quarter million rifles just lying around?

Because the

port union guys had sent them the ship full of stuff.

Exactly.

But meanwhile, they're trying to make deals with the Montenegrins and the Albanians.

And those guys are like, well, we need guns.

And they don't have any because they sent them all to Egypt.

Would you guys take some flowers?

There's this one bit where he convinces himself that his agents are meeting with a bunch of different Egyptians, but it's just one guy whose name they get slightly different each time.

And this guy just gets to be in like different luxury hotels in Rome for like three months in exchange for nothing and then leaves them with a 10,000 lira bill.

So wait, they were like, we're going to form a league with Egypt.

And so they met an Egyptian guy.

And then they were like, this is 20 guys.

Yeah, because they're like, well, that's Abdul Saeed.

And then this other guy is Dr.

Saeed.

And then this other guy is Abdul Saeez, who, you know, that's not a typo, I assume.

Crazy.

We're in league with Egypt, a country I'm hearing is called Egypt II.

That's what it's called, Egypt.

Egypt.

Just.

The principality of the Sinai, the upper and lower Nile Delta.

Privately, Denuncio agrees that the league has collapsed.

10 days after that, they announce it publicly, and they claim it has already obtained the explicit adhesion of Ireland, Egypt, all of Islam, and all the peoples engaged in the just struggle against the barbarous domination of the Serbs.

This is like an entire,

what if a city was a state was Theranos, kind of?

Like sort of accidentally fooled everybody and then just decided to start going along with it.

Domestically, there's this one syndicalist called Alcés de Ambriz, who is a kind of again kind of anathema to all of these right-wing guys, but is there to try and like push push

the like

regency left.

So like he has them declare this.

It's originally going to be a republic, but then Denuncio gets scared of the word.

So he calls it a regency, the regency of Carnaro, which has a kind of like very Freemasonic kind of

emblem of like an Aurobaros, like a snake eating its own tail

and like lots of other mystical elements.

And they write this constitution,

the Carta di Canaro, which is like this incredibly weird syndicalist constitution where it's like total human rights.

Everyone is a member of one of 10 job-based corporations.

So like if you're a fisherman, your life is beholden to the fisherman corporation.

And all of those corporations organize to elect two parliaments

and also do like, it's got a huge emphasis emphasis on the ceremonial.

So, like, all of those corporations are supposed to like venerate their dead and like celebrate heroes and like put on public fairs and stuff.

This is right-wing Akaria they're trying to create.

Yes,

they literally makes choral music a like cornerstone value, like constitutionally of the state.

Like, every child is going to be educated as a like as a chorister first.

If Denzio had gotten a hold of the book, My Travels in Icaria,

they would have gotten so much closer to the big dogs.

Tiny donkey or big dog, which way, Western man.

And like the whole time, Diamberus is trying to tell him, no, you're supposed to use this to precipitate the revolution in Italy.

Right.

And at this point, this is becoming more and more of a joke and it's never going to happen.

All of the guys who just wanted Fiome to be part of Italy are like, why are we attached to this strange experiment in choral music?

And

he's so out of hand.

Yeah, and so Dennuncio is constantly like convinced he's surrounded by turncoats and cowards.

And finally, the Italian government signs the Treaty of Rapallo, which gives Fiome to Yugoslavia, like they wanted to do all along.

And D'Annuncio is like, this is ultimate betrayal.

No one will stand for it.

Surely this won't be widely popularly accepted.

And of course it was.

So he tried to have his Arditi occupy two uninhabited islands without asking anyone else.

And this also did not work.

And finally, he's like, well, the one thing they'll never do, right?

Because all of these guys worship me.

You know, they're all, they're all defecting to my side.

This was eight, like 16 months ago at this point.

He's like, they would never shoot me.

This lasts until the Italian battleship Andrea Doria sends a cannonball through the window of his palace and almost kills him outright.

What are they going to do?

Shoot me?

Yes, yes.

And at long last, bloody Christmas 1920, the Italian army and navy just like seize the city and Dennuncio is like forced into retirement.

I mean, I guess it shows that like if you're, if you're, if you're Dennunzio and like that's your thing,

you have to be itinerant because you are a great storyteller.

I tried, except they tied him down.

They tied him down in one place.

for too long and he just ended up in this kind of constant whirling network of like contradictions

it's like they put a siege on the music man

you like you have to be able to like keep lying and then when people are starting to get tired of you go two towns over and then he just got trapped in the town because he was in charge of it because he lied so good He was, he was, he was busy doing things like celebrating the feast day of Saint Sebastian and receiving like a solid gold and silver bayonet and stuff.

I love that it started with him rolling up to town and saying, what are are you going to do?

Shoot me?

And then it ended when they shot him.

It's just incredible.

Like, and then 18 months pass.

He retired.

It's 16 months.

He doesn't even make it a year and a half.

He retires to obscurity,

which is briefly enlivened by Mussolini trying to have him pushed out of a window.

This guy's annoying.

Get rid of him.

Yeah, because he's still a pain in Mussolini's ass.

And then dies in obscurity.

Keller kind of

never really is trusted by the fascists either and and just kind of uh exists.

Koshnitsky just becomes a musicologist, but he does write the one sort of like paragraph that survives of Fiomer as like a kind of like as a dream, right?

As a kind of like hallucination.

Um, he writes, the illuminated piazza, the banners, the great written proclamations, the boats with their beflowered lanterns, even the sea had its role in the festival, and the dancers, they danced everywhere, in the piazza, in the streets, on the dock, by day, by night, they danced and sang, not with the voluptuous softness of the Venetian barcaroles, but rather an unrestrained bacchanal.

To the rhythm of martial fanfares, one saw sailors, soldiers, women, citizens, in bohemian embraces, recapturing the triple diversity of the primitive couples hailed by Aristophanes.

One's gaze, wherever it fixed, saw a dance of lanterns, of sparks, of stars, starving, in ruin, in anguish, perhaps on the verge of death in the flames or under a hail of grenades, Fiume, brandishing a torch, danced before the sea.

So that's the mythology.

And so we beat on boats against the current.

Yes, yeah, this was, this was, it turns out, not a good system for organizing a city.

There's a bit that I forgot to mention, the thing that was the sign that the economy got really, really bad is that in March.

March of 1920, they banned the sale of cakes and caramels.

So that's how you knew that things got like parties over.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But for a while, it created a lot of beautiful, weird times, maybe.

And

also kind of prefigured a lot of fascist politics.

A lot of the kind of like,

you know, mass politics of fascism is just lifted straight from Denuncio.

Yeah.

Well, a lot of it being like the sort of like fascism as the orgy of satisfaction.

Yes.

Yeah.

The kind of orgastic nature of it, which could not last, but which Mussolini kind of like lifted bits from and ultimately made somewhat more practical.

I'm excited to see this sort of on a global scale in the coming years, personally.

Yeah, I mean, we could, there's always time for one weird guy who's lying about being a war hero to briefly form out of heaven.

My favorite thing that

I don't think we noted, but we mentioned is at the very end, is Gui, like we did their whole like, Where are they now, right?

Is Guido Keller's Where Are They Now, is that he got revenge on the Italian state by flying over the parliament in a biplane and dropping a full chamber pot on it?

Yes, he did.

He did do that.

I think it's safe to say

in my, I've been alive a long time now.

I don't think I've ever heard of anything going worse than this.

I have one more detail about Gabriel D'Anoncio that I want to say, which is that he was very, very fond of...

You may have heard of

Maraschina, the cherry liqueur.

Beautiful cherries that I love to eat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The company that makes most of it is called Luxado, which is named after Givrolimo Luxado.

It was based in

Zara, which was another

city like Fiume that was kind of Italian, is now Croatian.

And so they had this weird alliance as like Dalmatian Italians.

And one of the things that DeNuncio was fondest of in the world was this particular cherry brandy this like sour cherry brandy he called sangue di molaco molacon's blood um which luxado in a weird kind of irredentist thing even though they're based in like padua now since 1945 still make still with d'nuncio's signature on the bottle to be like you know, the dream is still alive in this, in this liqueur.

I've tasted it.

It is fucking horrendous.

It's horrifying.

It's like, I hesitate to say that you can bottle fascism, but I felt sick for two days after drinking it.

Wow.

I'm approaching exact centrism by chugging a glass of that and then a big glass of Akarian wine

from Sonoma.

Yeah, they call it, it's a cocktail called the Perfect Center.

So

if you want to taste this episode,

what you do is you get a a big silver goblet full of like fondant chocolates and a glass of sangue di molaco, and you try that and you just have a horrible time.

But that is the story of Gabriel DeNuncio, mayor, I insist, of what is now the Croatian city of Rijeka, making the whole thing futile.

Thank you so much.

I

love this man.

I love to hear about him.

I've been calling him Gabe announcements in my head all week.

I mean, this goes back to the thing, right?

Where this is, this is a guy who ends up being a proto-fascist, but who you can see just kind of backs himself into that corner by just sort of scamming and grifting whoever he's around to just get to the next day.

So it's like, so it's, it's, it's seductive how like.

how much you want to not root yeah how much you i'm not going to root for him right because it's it's like the it's like this thing, right?

Where, you know, I don't want to go back to always the Sopranos is the form of reference, but let's go there.

Where because Tony is the protagonist, you end up just like rooting for the protagonist.

And it's so easy to be like, oh yeah, this guy's like, this guy is, this proto-fascist has made himself such a perfect protagonist of this story.

And he has so many of these like,

it's so easy to tell how the things snowball from just like, I like writing kind of bombastic poetry to I have accidentally become a figure of like a kind of revolutionary right.

Yeah.

And I think that's, that's the other thing, right?

Where like the modern fascist movement is full of guys who like made their bones scaring senior citizens into like buying overpriced gold bars.

You know?

It's crazy how many of these guys are just treading water.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is a guy who treaded water and then ended up up being pulled by a very, very strong current.

I think further than anyone, including he expected.

Yeah, that's, I think that's the historical judgment on Gabe announcements.

So

thank you so much for joining us.

What a guy.

Thank you so much, guys.

Yeah, this was a free episode, I believe.

I believe so.

We have a Patreon.

You can subscribe to it and get some bonus episodes.

Our next bonus episode, do we know what that's going to be?

No, because I've not turned in my homework yet, but it's going to be, I'm back in the mayor's chamber for that one.

It'll probably be somebody that was the mayor of a city this time.

Because just pick a pope.

Any pope will do.

Meantime, thank you so much for listening.

We will see you next time.

Bye, everyone.

Bye.