‘Posing for his sexual partner as a martyred saint, Gabriele d’Annuncio was titillating himself with the image of a young man tortured and killed.’ The Pike, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography of the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annuncio, is an unrivalled story of decadence and hedonism requiring, at times, a suspension of disbelief. Death, sadism and eroticism are constant and intertwining themes, to the extent that I wondered, when d’Annuncio urged young Italians into World War 1,