Seeds of Fascism: Century-Old Soiled Hanky Could Enable Cloning of Carnaro Regency’s Tin-Pot Dictator-Prince

Sometimes there’s a theme in a week’s minor news stories, and this week it seems to be: the mislaid spermatazoa of flamboyantly (even specifically upward-turning!) mustachioed Mediterranean fascist-sympathizing bohemian egomaniacs.  First, there was the news that one Pilar Abel, a 58-year-old Spaniard, was filing a paternity suit against the estate of Salvador Dalí, claiming the bombastic Catalan surrealist painter had had an affair with her mother while he was married to Gala Diakonova Éluard Dalí, his Tatarstan-born Russo-Spanish muse.  Of course, the case will get tossed right out; after all, she looks nothing like him:

And now there is the news that police in Italy have used a semen-stained handkerchief to map the genome of Gabriele d’Annunzio, an Italian poet, playwright, and ennobled prince who founded his own authoritarian micronation of sorts, the Regency of Carnaro, in 1919, and styled himself “il Duce” (“the Leader”) in anticipation of the eventual rise of Benito Mussolini.  The aristocratic snail tracks were sent, in 1916, to Countess Olga Levi Brunner, d’Annunzio’s mistress, and were preserved for most of a century in a private collection in Cagliari, Sardinia.  The hanky is now housed with other Annunziana at the Vittoriale degli Italiani (“Shrine of Italian Victories”) museum at his the prince’s former home on Lake Garda in Lombardy.

Gabriele d’Annunzio, Prince of Montenevoso

In the aftermath of the First World War, the Kingdom of Italy and the fledgling Kingdom of Yugoslavia were still squabbling over where their final border would be.  D’Annunzio, a wildly popular poet and war hero, in 1919 marched a makeshift army into Fiume—a then-Italian-populated town which today is on the Croatia side of the border and named Rijeka—and claimed it for Italy.  Italy’s King Victor Immanuel III, however, wanted no part of the plot and declined to formally reabsorb the enclave.  So d’Annunzio—an androgynous and wildly prolific bisexual erotic conqueror who followed the Italian art movement called Decadentism and whose megalomaniacal nicknames for himself included “il Magnifico” (“the Magnificent”) and “il Profeto” (“the Prophet”)—declared the town the Regency of Carnaro (Reggenza Italiana del Carnaro) and ran it as his de facto–independent personal fief for a year before the Italian navy retook the town.  Carnaro’s bizarre constitution, which was a piece of performance art in itself, declared “music” to be the founding political principle of the state, but d’Annunzio’s bombastic balcony speeches and black-shirted militias anticipated—some would say laid the groundwork for—the capital-F Fascism which later, in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, swallowed up Italy and half of Europe.  (Carnaro was later known as the Free State of Fiume (Stato Libero di Fiume) and in 1924 was formally attached to Italy.  After the Second World War, despite an attempt to revive the Carnaro entity, it reverted to Yugoslavian control.)

Olga Brunner, the prince’s mistress.
She’d better wait till the maid leaves the room before opening the mail.

Two years after Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922 and began gently bending the monarchy to his will, Victor Immanuel III ennobled d’Annunzio as “Prince of Montenevoso”—the geographical principality in question being an Alpine town and district then within Italy but now known as Snežnik, in the Republic of Slovenia.

Poor Prince Gabriele: before the age of smartphones and “sexting,”
little ... um ... presents had to be sent through the royal mails.

D’Annunzio’s semen and its DNA are being used for comparison with his great-grandson Federico d’Annunzio, the current Prince of Montenevoso (Italy, a republic, nonetheless retains a semi-official aristocracy), and all press reports indicate that it is a test run for forensic genomics that does not rely on exhumation.  Though one wonders if something else is going on.  A succession dispute or paternity case?

In the waning days of the Second World War, a second try
at an independent Carnaro also claimed some now-Croatian islands in the Adriatic.

Indeed, the chief of the museum which owns the crusty rag, Giordano Bruno Guerri, raised, in an interview, the specter of a kind of small-scale version of The Boys from Brazil, musing that theoretically the poet, whom Italians regard as ambivalent sort of national hero and who died in 1938, could now be cloned.  “Nobody wants to clone d’Annunzio,” Guerri hastily clarified, “but nobody knows what changes will take place in science and society.  It’s good the DNA has been collected.”  Hmm, hard to know where he’s going with that.  If Guerri is planning to clone and breed a Decadentist pro-Fascist aristocracy to wrest control of Italy from corrupt republican politicos and imperialist Teutonic creditors, then where will it end?  We may have to swipe Monica Lewinsky’s dress from the Department of Justice’s evidence vault and clone an army of Bill Clintons to stop him.  Who’s in?

[You can read more about the Free State of Fiume, the Regency of Carnaro, and other bizarre and obscure separatist movements in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Slovene E.U. Diplomat’s Words on Vojvodina’s Status Ruffle Serb Feathers

Vojvodine nationalists rallying in Novi Sad, the provincial capital

Jelko Kacin, a Slovenian diplomat who is the European Union’s “rapporteur” for the Republic of Serbia, stepped on a landmine in the European Parliament last week by calling for a clarification of the status of Vojvodina, an autonomous—but not really—province within Serbia.  Then his remarks were interpreted with great alarm, putting the Serbian foreign ministry into damage-control mode.

Jelko Kacin

While speaking on a panel on Vojvodina at the E.U. legislature in Brussels, Belgium, Kacin said, “Having in mind upcoming negotiations on Serbia’s membership in the E.U., I believe this is the right moment to raise the question of the constitutional and statutory regulation of the autonomy of Vojvodina.  The present framework for autonomy is uncertain and vague, which prevents Vojvodina, and therefore Serbia, from developing its capacities.”

Map showing Vojvodina within the former Yugoslavia (the green countries)

Vojvodina, in the north of Serbia and forming the only Serbian borders with Hungary and Croatia, is historically and potentially one of the most multi-ethnic and contentious portions of the former Yugoslavia, but it largely stayed out of the fray of the Wars of Yugoslav Secession in the early 1990s.  Vojvodina was an ethnically-Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but when the empire was dismantled after losing the First World War the newly created independent Hungarian Republic set Vojvodina, including a portion of what is now western Romania, as a Hungarian-dominated Banat Republic.  Serbian and Romanian forces invaded the fledgling Banatia, as it was also known, and divvied it up: Romania got what is now its western Transylvania region, while Serbia absorbed the rest and made it the autonomous province of Danube Banovina within the Serbian part of the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia.  (For a discussion of separatism in Transylvania, see a recent article from this blog.)

During the Second World War, the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state, and Hungary, then an Axis power, took over the province and tried to revive the Banat Republic, with ethnic Germans and Hungarians in charge.  It failed, and after the war Yugoslavia filled its vacant Nazi concentration camps with Vojvodina’s Germans, who were subsequently cleansed from the province, and Danube Banovina was renamed Vojvodina.

As the “Banat Republic,” Vojvodina (dark green, at center) almost achieved independence
in the aftermath of the First World War.

Yugoslavia’s Communist dictator, Josip Broz Tito, granted Vojvodina some genuine, but limited, autonomy in 1974, but then Vojvodina’s hopes of further loosening ties to Belgrade after the fall of the Berlin Wall were dashed when Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milošević, revoked its autonomy in 1990.  It has never been restored, so it is the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in name only.  Ethnically, the region is two-thirds Serb, but the 13% Magyar (ethnic Hungarian) minority feels that, with the de facto independence of Kosovo—once Serbia’s other “autonomous province”—they are the last colonized people in the Serb mini-empire.  Belgrade is ever alert to the possibility of the province flaring up in rebellion.

Vojvodina’s autonomy: Tito giveth, and Slobo taketh away

In Brussels, Mr. Kacin—a former independence leader during Slovenia’s “Ten-Day War” of secession from Belgrade in 1990—was not being inflammatory.  He merely pointed out that if Serbia is to get its bureaucratic house in order in preparation for E.U. candidacy, then it must sort out Vojvodina’s financial relationship to the central government.  If it is an autonomous unit, then it is eligible for special E.U. funds after accession, but if so, the implication went, it would have to start being treated autonomously, and its role in the levying and spending of tax funds must be clarified.  Pending resolution of the conflict over Kosovo, Serbia is considered close to the front of the line for E.U. enlargement, along with Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo itself.

Aleksandar Vučić

Serbia was furious at this interest in its internal structure, however, and by September 19th, Serbia’s first deputy prime minister, Aleksandar Vučić, had bullied Kacin into appearing alongside him at a special press conference, where he intoned sternly that Kacin’s statement was liable to misinterpretation, adding, “I can say this in Kacin’s presence, because I know he also believes that Vojvodina cannot be separated from Serbia.”

One wonders if Kacin, during this, thought to himself, “Where have I heard those words before?  Oh, yes—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo ...”

[You can read more about Vojvodina, Kosovo, other sovereignty and independence movements both famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]