A New Episode and a New YouTube Video

Just in case you missed me, today I published two new things to give you enough Bolelli-content that you may end up speaking with an Italian accent by the time you are done listening with all of it.

Let’s start with a new History on Fire two-part series. Or, rather, the series was originally created a few years ago, but since it was behind a paywall, it’s brand new to the overwhelming majority of you. It holds a special place in my heart, since my father helped me with the research shortly before he died, so this work is dedicated to him.

This is the tale of one of the weirdest cultural-political experiments in modern history. The brutal end of WWI left many Italian soldiers dissatisfied, since the Allies refused to grant them lands they had conquered at the price of rivers of blood. Feeling cheated by their own government and the Allies, some of these soldiers turned to the most popular man in the entire country: Gabriele D’Annunzio. Saying that he was a famous writer and a veteran of WWI doesn’t capture the magnetic power the man possessed. He was a true rock star before rock stars were a thing. He stopped traffic wherever he went. He made army units desert without using any weapon but his voice. Countless women risked their marriages, families and careers for a chance to have a fling with him. Casanova was an amateur compared to D’Annunzio. In 1919, D’Annunzio agreed to lead renegade units of the Italian Army to taking over the border city of Fiume. Despite the fact that this infuriated the Italian, French, British and American governments, D’Annunzio would go on to rule for fifteen months over an outlaw state where things that were not looked kindly upon in the world of 1919 (from drug use to free love, from the right to vote for women to nudism, from homosexuality to piracy) were widely practiced.

Part One of this two-part series tackles the Italian experience in WWI, D’Annunzio’s literary and military career, the raid to occupy Fiume, the Futurist movement, the wild culture in Fiume, a pre-1960s sexual revolution, Guido Keller (the craziest man in town), and much more.

And for the second piece of content released today, here’s the video of a conversation with fellow historian Terri Barnes. She is specialized in the Viking Age, and is the author of an excellent substack. Today, we have a chat about the intersection of past, present and future. In particular, we muse about how technology is changing history and what it means to be human.

Here’s the video: