For sixteen months a poet ruled a city as if it were a theatre: a balcony for a stage, a square for a stalls, a crowd that shouted its lines back. In this unit you will read about Fiume in 1919 and 1920, learn how to write , write a scene of your own, and perform it aloud yourself, giving each character a different voice.
Reading
Grammar: present simple for stage directions
Writing a script
Pronunciation: intonation
Reading aloud
01Reading: the balcony
Fiume, September 1919 to December 1920 · written for this lesson
1. On 12 September 1919, Gabriele D'Annunzio rode into Fiume in an open car at the head of a column of soldiers. He was 56 years old, famous across Europe as a poet, a playwright and a wartime pilot. The Italian population of the city met him with cheers and flags. That evening he spoke to a packed square from the balcony of the Governor's Palace.
2. For the next sixteen months the balcony was a stage. D'Annunzio spoke from it almost every day. He did not only give speeches: he asked the crowd questions, and the crowd shouted the answers back. "To whom does Italy belong?" he would ask. "To us!" the crowd roared. This is called . Instead of "Hip, hip, hurrah!", which he thought sounded foreign, he gave the crowd a battle cry he had invented during the war, in August 1917: "Eia, eia, eia! Alalà!"
3. The city was full of uniforms. Many of D'Annunzio's designed their own, with capes, daggers, feathers and black shirts. There were parades and , torchlight , fireworks, concerts and dances. One legionary remembered: "One ate, one danced, one drank." Artists, poets and adventurers came from all over Europe. The pilot Guido Keller and the young writer Giovanni Comisso started a club of free spirits called Yoga. A Belgian poet, Léon Kochnitzky, ran Fiume's office for foreign relations.
4. On Saturday 20 November 1920 the conductor Arturo Toscanini arrived by train from Milan with his orchestra, his wife and their children. A military band met the musicians at the station, playing patriotic songs. At the Governor's Palace D'Annunzio welcomed them with a speech and gave the orchestra a new name: the "Orphic Legion". That same evening, at the Teatro Verdi, they gave a three-hour concert for the poor of the city: Vivaldi, Beethoven, Debussy, Respighi and the overture to Verdi's Sicilian Vespers. The packed theatre exploded with applause. One report said: "Everyone seems to have gone mad." The audience, D'Annunzio among them, called for , and the orchestra ended with the "Death of Isolde" from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Then D'Annunzio climbed onto the stage to thank the musicians, and Toscanini handed him his . The next morning D'Annunzio put on a different kind of show for his guests: a at the Cantrida stadium, with real gunfire and hand grenades. Several legionaries were wounded by flying metal, a musician was on the face, and Toscanini's hat was hit. By then the Italian government wanted D'Annunzio out of Fiume, and the end was close. Kochnitzky wrote: "Fiume dances before death."
Fiume, 20 September 1919, eight days after D'Annunzio arrived. The writing on the photograph says Gabriele D'Annunzio parla: "Gabriele D'Annunzio is speaking". He stands among the officers under the balcony; the balcony is full of listeners, and soldiers fill the street. Photograph: Betti. Look closely: who is the audience here, and where is the stage?
Write at least 20 characters first.
Sample answer: D'Annunzio was the actor and the crowd in the square was the audience. But the crowd also had lines to say: it shouted answers to his questions and repeated his battle cry, so it became part of the performance, like a chorus in a play.
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Sample answer: The speaker calls out a question and the crowd shouts back an answer, as in "To whom does Italy belong?" "To us!" When people say the words themselves, together and loudly, they feel that the idea belongs to them. A listening crowd can stay quiet and doubt; a shouting crowd has already agreed.
Sample answer: "Orphic" comes from Orpheus, the musician of Greek myth whose songs could move animals and stones. "Legion" was the word for his soldiers. The new name made the musicians part of his army, and made his army sound like something from poetry and myth. Music and soldiering became one show.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Sample answer: He means the city kept celebrating even though everyone could see the end coming. Dancing is joyful and carefree, so putting it next to death makes the picture both beautiful and frightening, like a party on a sinking ship.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Sample answer: He wanted to give them a show in return: they had performed for him, so his soldiers performed for them. In Fiume the concert and the battle were two kinds of theatre, and the line between art and war was very thin. A musician was hurt and Toscanini's hat was hit, so the "show" was also really dangerous.
02Reading: who came to Fiume
The balcony had an audience of thousands. Who were they? Fiume pulled in people from the far right and the far left, soldiers and poets, rebels and some of the most famous artists in Europe.
Fiume, 1919–1920 · written for this lesson
1. A city of many peoples. Fiume was a busy port on the northern Adriatic Sea. Before the war it had belonged to Hungary, inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Most people in the city centre spoke Italian; across the small river Rječina, in the neighbouring town of Sušak, most spoke Croatian; and the city also had Hungarians, Germans, Slovenes and a Jewish community. When the empire collapsed in 1918, both Italy and the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes claimed the city, and the peace conference in Paris could not decide. D'Annunzio came to settle the question by force. He meant to stay a few days. He stayed sixteen months.
2. Soldiers of every kind. The first to follow him were soldiers. Many were , Italy's shock troops from the war: young men trained to attack enemy trenches with daggers and hand grenades, who wore black shirts and a skull badge. Others were ordinary soldiers who left their units without permission to join him; to the Italian army, they were . came because they wanted Fiume to be Italian. came to serve the King, and came who wanted to get rid of him. They did not share a political programme. They shared a mood: the war was over, and they did not want to go home to an ordinary life.
3. The far left in the same city. Fiume did not only attract the right. Alceste De Ambris was a , a trade-union leader who had organised strikes before the war and had been elected a Socialist member of parliament in 1913. In January 1920 he became head of D'Annunzio's cabinet, and he wrote the first draft of the Charter of Carnaro. The Charter gave women and men equal rights, including the right to vote and to hold any office, and promised freedom of religion, of thought and of the press. and socialists came to see the experiment for themselves, and the Regency was one of the first states in the world to recognize Lenin's Soviet Russia. De Ambris later refused to join Mussolini. He died in in France in 1934, a bookseller living in poverty.
4. Rebels and dreamers. Guido Keller was a pilot who had won the Silver Medal for bravery three times. In Fiume he slept in a tree with a pet eagle, was often photographed naked, and led a unit that captured supplies for the city by . With the young writer Giovanni Comisso he founded Yoga, a club of free spirits interested in mysticism, nudism and new ways of living. In November 1920 Keller flew over Rome. He dropped flowers on the Vatican and on the King's palace, and on the Italian parliament he dropped a chamber pot full of carrots and turnips, with a message for a government "based on lies and fear". The Belgian poet Léon Kochnitzky, who ran Fiume's foreign office, planned a League of Fiume: an "anti-League of Nations" for the oppressed peoples of the world, from Ireland and Catalonia to Egypt, India and China.
5. Serious artists, too. Fiume was not a carnival of amateurs. D'Annunzio was the most famous living Italian writer: a novelist, a poet and a playwright whose plays had starred the great actresses Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt. Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, came in September 1919, though he stayed only a few weeks. Arturo Toscanini, the most famous conductor in the world, brought his orchestra. Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909, sailed into the harbour on his yacht Elettra in September 1920. These people did not agree with one another, and later they went in opposite directions. In 1931 Toscanini was beaten by fascists in Bologna for refusing to conduct their ; others became leading fascists. For sixteen months, they all shared one stage.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Sample answer: arditi (shock troops), deserters from the regular army, nationalists, monarchists and republicans. They did not share a political programme; they shared a mood. The war was over and they did not want to go back to an ordinary life.
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Sample answer: On the right, the nationalists and the arditi wanted Italy to take Fiume by force and admired war and the army. On the left, De Ambris was a trade-union leader and Socialist deputy who wrote equal rights for women and men into the Charter, and the Regency recognized Lenin's Soviet Russia.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Sample answer: It shows that Fiume was not one movement with one set of ideas. People with opposite beliefs lived side by side, and the laws were written by a left-wing syndicalist while the streets were full of right-wing soldiers. What united them was the show, not the programme.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Sample answer: To Toscanini: 1. Did you enjoy playing in Fiume? 2. What did you think when the soldiers welcomed your musicians with a parade? 3. Why did you refuse to conduct the fascist anthem in 1931?
03Reading: music as law
On 8 September 1920 D'Annunzio announced a constitution for Fiume, the Charter of Carnaro. Most constitutions talk about voting, courts and taxes. This one also has articles about music. Here are parts of articles 64 and 65.
The Charter of Carnaro, 1920 · articles 64 and 65 · shortened and translated for this lesson
In the Italian Regency of Carnaro, Music is a religious and social .
Every rebirth of a noble people is a effort. Every new order is a lyric order, in the strongest sense of the word.
In every town there will be a and an orchestra paid for by the State.
In the city of Fiume, a great concert hall will be built, with seats for at least ten thousand listeners.
The great choral and orchestral festivals will be completely free.
"Orchestra A. Toscanini", the name written above the musicians. Toscanini put this orchestra together in 1920 and brought it to Fiume that November, where D'Annunzio called it the "Orphic Legion". Where and when this photograph was taken is not known.
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Sample answer: 1. Every town will have a choral society and an orchestra paid for by the State. 2. Fiume will build a concert hall for at least ten thousand people. 3. The big festivals will be free. The concert hall surprises me most: ten thousand seats is enormous for a small city, so it was really a hall for the whole crowd, like the square under the balcony.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Sample answer: Both believed that poetry should not stay in books. Marinetti wanted poetry to be "a violent assault" and to sing of crowds and machines; D'Annunzio wrote music and poetry into the laws of a state. For both of them, art was a way of changing the world, and politics was a kind of art.
04Watch: Fiume restaged
In 2025 the director Igor Bezinović, who grew up in Rijeka, asked the people of his city to act out D'Annunzio's sixteen months, in the same squares and streets. Watch the trailer and look for the moments that look like a stage play: a performer, an audience, costumes, a script.
Fiume o morte! (2025) · dir. Igor Bezinović · trailer from the International Film Festival Rotterdam
05Reading a script
A script has two kinds of text. Lines are the words a character says. Stage directions tell the actors where they are and what they do. Read this short scene. The call and response is historical; the rest is imagined for this lesson.
The Balcony
A scene for six voices · about two minutes
SettingFiume, the evening of 12 September 1919. The square in front of the Governor's Palace. Bells are ringing. Flags hang from every window. A crowd is waiting.
A WOMAN with a basket of flowers pushes to the front. A YOUNG SOLDIER in a black shirt stands beside her.
WomanIs he coming? Can you see him?
Young soldier(pointing up) There! The doors are opening.
The balcony doors open slowly. D'ANNUNZIO steps out. He is small and bald, in a grey uniform. He raises one hand. The crowd falls silent.
D'Annunzio(quietly) Citizens of Fiume. Tonight the whole world is looking at this square.
D'Annunzio(louder) To whom does Fiume belong?
CrowdTo us!
D'AnnunzioTo whom does Italy belong?
CrowdTo us!
D'AnnunzioThen give me your cry!
CrowdEia, eia, eia! Alalà!
The WOMAN throws her flowers toward the balcony. A band starts to play. The YOUNG SOLDIER lifts a CHILD onto his shoulders.
ChildWho is that man?
Young soldier(laughing) A poet.
The lights fade.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Sample answer: Present simple: "D'ANNUNZIO steps out." "He raises one hand." "The crowd falls silent." Present continuous: "Bells are ringing." / "A crowd is waiting." The setting uses the present continuous because these things are already happening when the scene begins; the present simple is for each new action as it happens.
Write at least 20 characters first.
Sample answer: The scene shows a leader, soldiers and a roaring crowd, so the audience expects the answer "a general" or "our leader". "A poet" is a surprise, and it reminds us of the strange truth of Fiume: a city was being ruled by a man of words and theatre.
06Grammar: writing stage directions
Four rules
Rule
Example
Use the present simple for actions. The action happens now, in front of the audience.
D'Annunzio steps out. The crowd falls silent.
Use the present continuous for what is already happening when the scene begins.
Bells are ringing. A crowd is waiting.
Show how a line is said with an adverb or a short phrase in brackets.
(quietly) · (louder) · (pointing up)
Write a character's name in CAPITALS the first time they appear.
A WOMAN pushes to the front.
Careful with the present simple: he/she/it and singular nouns take -s (he steps, the crowd falls). Crowd is singular. Irregular past forms change back: fell → falls, threw → throws, rose → rises.
Practice: turn the story into stage directions
07Speaking: the voice goes up, the voice goes down
When you read a script aloud, the tells the listener what kind of sentence it is.
Yes/no questions usually go up ↗ at the end: Is he coming?↗
Wh- questions (who, what, where, to whom…) usually go down ↘: Who is that man?↘
Statements, orders and cries go down ↘. A falling voice sounds sure: To us!↘
Choose ↗ or ↘ for each line from the scene. Tap 🔊 to hear it.
08Writing: your scene
Write a two-minute scene (150 to 300 words) about one moment in Fiume. Choose your moment:
Leave Who empty for a stage direction. Write the character's name for a line. Put how they say it in brackets at the start: (angrily) …
setting written
3+ characters
4+ stage directions
a call and response
2+ (how it's said)
150–300 words
ends with a stage direction
0 words
09Performance: read your scene aloud
In class, you will read your whole scene aloud on camera, alone. You are the narrator and every character.
Read once for meaning. Read it quietly to yourself. Check that you can say every word.
Give each character a voice. Make each one different: higher or lower, faster or slower, louder or quieter.
Mark your lines. Write ↗ or ↘ at the end of each question and underline the stressed words.
Stage directions in a calm voice. Read them like a narrator, and leave a short pause after each one. Crowd lines are short, loud and falling ↘.
Perform. Camera on. Look up from the page at the end of each line.
10Vocabulary
The twelve words to learn from this unit. Tap 🔊 to hear each one.