Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938), poet, personality, and proto-fascist.

May 5 1915, Genoa–Although his literary efforts are now largely forgotten, the poet, novelist, and playwright Gabriele D'Annunzio was perhaps the most widely-known living Italian in 1915. His writing was acclaimed, and he had a personality to match; Mark Thompson writes that “His greyhounds wore livery tailored by Hermès. His correspondence with his jeweller has been published as a separate volume.” Since 1910 he had been living in self-imposed exile in Paris. He had long been an ardent nationalist and jingo; a 1911 series of poems celebrated Italy’s war against Turkey and attacked Austria as well. Lines comparing the Austrian national symbol to “the head of a vulture which vomits the undigested flesh of his victims” got his works censored by Giolitti’s government in Italy due to their potential threat to Italy’s foreign relations. He welcomed the war when it came, seeing it as “almost divine…[a] struggle of races, an opposition of irreconcilable power, a trial of blood,” and strongly advocated Italy’s entry on the side of the Allies. 

He returned to Italy in glorious fashion in early May, having been invited to speak at the dedication of a monument to Garibaldi and his redshirts in Genoa. He arrived on the evening of May 4, telling the crowd greeting him: “Doubt cannot touch us. We shall not let Italy be dishonored; we shall not let the fatherland perish…[You want] a greater Italy, not by acquisition but by conquest, not measured in shame but but as the price of blood and glory." 

His main speech was given the next day; the King and his government were to have been in attendance, but were kept away by Salandra at the last moment. D'Annunzio was surrounded by Italian volunteers who had served on the Western Front, released by the French to help D'Annunzio spread his pro-Allied propaganda in Italy. It featured such gems as this take on the Sermon on the Mount:

O blessed are they that have, for they have more to give, they can burn more brightly. Blessed are the twenty-year-olds, pure of mind, well-tempered in body, with courageous mothers. Blessed are they who, waiting with confidence, do not dissipate their strength but guard it in the discipline of the warrior. Blessed are they who disdain sterile love-affairs to be virgins for this first and last love. Blessed are the young who hunger and thirst for glory, for they shall be sated. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall have splendid blood to wipe away, radiant pain to bind up.

He continued in like manner, lamenting the fate of "the martyred cities” under the Austrian yoke. He would then continue onto Rome in the subsequent days, where from his hotel balcony he would say:

No we are not, we do not want to be a museum, an inn, a holiday destination, a horizon touched up with Prussian blue for international honeymoons, a delightful marketplace for buying and selling, for swindling and bartering. Our Genius calls us to put our stamp on the confused material of the new world.

He then railed against the government:

If it is a crime to incite the citizens to violence, then I boast of committing that crime. Today the treachery is blatant. We don’t only breathe in its horrid stench, we feel all its appalling weight. And the treachery is being committed in Rome, city of the soul, city of life.

Of course, the government, unbeknownst to D'Annunzio, had already committed themselves to war by the Treaty of London. The day before D'Annunzio’s speech in Genoa, the government repudiated the Triple Alliance that had bound them to Germany and Austria. Reacting to this news, and to D'Annunzio’s vitriolic speech, Italian chief of staff Cadorna rushed to meet Salandra, warning him that “this means immediate war!” Salandra then informed Cadorna that they were bound to enter the war by May 26; this was the first Cadorna, the man responsible for the Italian Army, had heard of this. 

Sources include: Mark Thompson, The White War.