A Tale Of Two Monuments

When author ROSALYN D’MELLO visited the Vittoriale degli Italiani, she could not shake off its fascist history. But a spontaneous visit to Nek Chand’s Rock Garden in Chandigarh had a vastly different effect. She ponders the enduring legacies of two contrasting artists.

- Rosalyn D’Mello

A pall of gloomy clouds hung over the perceivable horizon. We braved the chilly winds blowing over the waters of Lake Garda so we could soak in the view from the uppermost deck of the ferry we boarded from Malcesine, a medieval hamlet on the eastern shore. Perhaps because the weather didn’t permit either swimming or lounging, we’d decided on an excursion to Gardone Riviera, on the western shore, north of Salò. For the moment, the sky seemed to exercise welcome restraint.

It was my father-in-law who’d suggested seeing the Vittoriale when we’d told him about our Lake Garda weekend plans, which in turn jogged my partner’s memory of a school trip there years ago. He vividly recollected the sale of fascist memorabilia outside the last home of the Italian writer, Gabriele D’Annunzio. These inappropriate stalls no longer exist. However, without their ostensible presence, a visitor could be none the wiser about D’Annunzio’s legacy as a proto-fascist.

Until then, I, too, hadn’t given much thought to his ideological position. I had inferred, through osmosis, that as a literary figure Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938) enjoyed the same reverential status within the Italian imagination as Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) did within the Indian equivalent. Both were ‘Renaissance Men’. Except, Tagore is celebrated for his iconoclastic repudiation of nationalism and the xenophobic perpetuation of man-made borders. D’Annunzio, on the other hand, was, as Benito Mussolini had suggested, the ‘John the Baptist of fascism’.

D’Annunzio was not just a poet, I would soon learn. He was The Poet (Il Vate) and