style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">Mussolini’s favourite author, the Italian poet-aviator Gabriele d’Annunzio, is regarded by many as a soft pornographer, at best a dilettante of sensation. He achieved international renown with his novel of Nietzschean derring-do, The Triumph of Death (1894). A minor masterpiece of hothouse purple-patchery, it helped to give the adjective dannunziano to the Italian language.