War Machines
To visit Gabriele D’Annunzio’s villa and garden at Gardone Riviera on Lake Garda is to experience the commemoration of speed as the essential sign of modernity. This is speed vectored through that other sign of modernity: mechanized warfare. Beyond his poetry, the villa and garden are D’Annunzio’s truly prefigurative artworks of the twentieth century. The Vittoriale degli italiani (The Shrine of Italian Victories), as the estate is named, is a remarkable and disturbing testament to the ‘man-machine’ of D’Annunzio’s protofuturist and protofascist vision. It contains all the ‘speed machines’ that embody this aesthetics of acceleration and war. There is the Motoscafo Armato Silurante MAS-96 anti-submarine motorboat D’Annunzio captained, and the name of which he détourned into the Latin motto Memento audere semper – ‘remember always to dare’). The SVA-5 aeroplane in which he flew to drop propaganda leaflets and bombs in the ‘il Volo su Vienna’ (‘Flight over Vienna’) as squadron leader of the ‘La Serenissima’ 87th fightersquadron on 9 August 1918. The most striking machine is the warship Puglia, donated by the Italian government and now embedded into the hillside.
The phallic ship thrusting from the hillside seems to embody exactly the masculine and protofascist mastery over nature by technology and acceleration. D’Annunzio wrote that the prow of a warship was ‘a monstrous phallic elongation’.1 It embodies what Paul Virilio, writing of the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, called the ‘inhuman type’: ‘an animal body that disappears in the superpower of a metallic body able to annihilate time and space through its dynamic performances.’2 D’Annunzio’s personal motto ‘per non dormire’ (‘In order not to sleep’) captures perfectly, in advance, this vectoring of human will into a mechanized acceleration that displaces any organic need. It might also stand as the motto for contemporary capitalism, which, as Jonathan Crary has noted, declares war on sleep as one of the few residual and non-productive human activities.3
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