In December 1891, Gabriele D’Annunzio was living in Naples, where Matilde Serao and her husband Edoardo Scarfoglio, who had founded a new daily newspaper, “il Corriere di Napoli”, put their trust in their friend by serializing the novel “L’innocente”, rejected by the publisher Treves because it was considered immoral. The Neapolitan sojourn, which in the writer’s initial intentions was to be just two weeks, was instead to be prolonged for two years.
In the shadow of Vesuvius, in fact, the spark between the Vate and the “restless” Sicilian princess Maria Gravina Cruyllas di Ramacca, whom he met in Francavilla a mare, was ignited. Maria is the daughter of Francesco Gravina prince of Ramacca, she was given in marriage to Count Anguissola di San Damiano, but relations with her spouse were never good. “When Maria Gravina meets Gabriele, she is no longer in her early youth, she is 30 years old, but she has retained a marvellous beauty: tall, slender… she also has a curious whim of nature: among her thick black hair she has hidden a lock of hair so red that if she shakes her head you can believe it is the sign of a wound’. (Guglielmo Gatti, Life of Gabriele D’Annunzio).
D’Annunzio already has three children by his wife and is having an affair with the Trastevere-born Barbara Leoni; Cruyllas is married and has four children, but for neither of them are obviously insurmountable obstacles: like two adolescents, they both allow themselves to be overwhelmed by passion and find themselves in intimacy, insatiable and voluptuous, in each other’s arms. For him, of bourgeois and provincial extraction, this is the great conquest: ‘Maria has a series of titles that would make a modest bourgeois from Pescara faint… Cruyllas strikes a chord with the Poet, who like all short men of stature has a weakness for imposing women.’ (Piero Chiara)
Count Anguissola, due to financial difficulties, moved to live with his parents; his wife remained in Naples, with their offspring, in a flat on Via Caracciolo not far from the hotel where she met furtively for months with D’Annunzio. When her husband surprises the couple, the lovers are accused of adultery and are forced to stand trial: they are sentenced to five months imprisonment. The sentence is suspended thanks to a royal amnesty, but the princess is deprived of custody of her children.
D’Annunzio and Cruyllas found hospitality in the icy Medicean castle of Princess Emma Gallone, but the scorching first months of passion were followed by sad months of misery: it is said that they often lacked bread… and meanwhile she was pregnant.
When D’Annunzio finally manages to publish another serial novel, “The Triumph of Death”, it is a breath of fresh air for the couple: the sum collected allows them to leave the Ottaviano castle and move to a more comfortable house in Resina. Here, on 9 January 1893, a baby girl was born, the only girl of the Vate’s five children. Her birth name is Eva Adriana Renata, daughter of Count Guido Anguissola; her mother calls her “Ciucciuzza”. D’Annunzio would only recognise her later and the poet would always remain particularly and affectionately attached to her: Renata “Ciciuzza”, once an adult, would look after him during the period of forced blindness in the Casetta Rossa in Venice.
Cruyllas, on the other hand, begins to feel the weight of financial hardship, becomes extremely jealous and begins to suffer from mental disorders. Outbursts are the order of the day: she becomes angry, shouts, destroys furniture, manuscripts and everything else within reach
The relationship with the Sicilian lady becomes an unbearable cage for the volatile poet, from which he wants to escape as soon as possible: ‘I feel my strength leaving… She marries me and makes me sterile… If I stay with her, I am lost.
He decides to change environment to get out of the suffocating and dangerous isolation with his partner. The couple moves with the child to a rented cottage in Francavilla. To Hérelle, the translator of his books, D’Annunzio writes: “I live with a sick woman”. The erotic excesses of his lover, which had at first kindled his enthusiasm, now disgusted him… The meeting and beginning of a love affair with Eleonora Duse in Venice proved to be providential.
The bond with Maria Gravina Cruyllas was by then broken, but the flighty Abruzzese never took it upon himself to end a love affair once and for all; his instinct led him to flee and at the same time to always leave himself an open pothole… Cruyllas in fact gave birth to another son, Dante Gabriele, in 1895, but unlike with Renata, D’Annunzio did not want to recognise him. He claims the child is not his and gives the name of the alleged father: Rocco Pesce, a servant. He probably does not recognise him to avoid another trial for adultery; or because he is now firmly resolved to leave the princess who makes his life impossible with her jealousy and who prevents him from working. Many years later, when Dante Gabriele will join the Vate in Fiume in 1920, the latter will write a declaration in his own hand calling him ‘the secretly beloved son whom today my hope consecrates heir of all my ephemeral and perennial sovereignties’.
Passion is quickly consumed and soon only the ashes of that bond that lasted barely a five-year period remain.
Only a short time after the birth of the child in fact D’Annunzio began another tormented love affair in the light of day with Eleonora Duse, and Cruyllas also abandoned her two little children Renata and Dante Gabriele to their fate, to run, according to some, a brothel first in Florence and then in Rome; according to others, a second-rate boarding house in Montecarlo where she died a few years later, in extreme loneliness.
Photo Credits: www.centrostudidannunziani.it