The house where Gabriele d'Annunzio was born in 1863 is now a museum dedicated to the poet, novelist, and political adventurer who became one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Italian culture. The building is one of the few 19th-century structures in Pescara to have survived the Allied bombing campaign of 1943 largely intact, and it stands in the otherwise unremarkable quarter of the old city south of the river.
Inside, the rooms have been preserved more or less as they were in d'Annunzio's childhood, with period furniture, family photographs, and documents tracing the early years of a man who would go on to write a shelf of celebrated novels and plays, lead an illegal military occupation of the city of Fiume, and invent many of the theatrical gestures later borrowed by Mussolini. For anyone with an interest in Italian literary or political history, this is genuinely absorbing. For those less familiar with d'Annunzio, the museum provides good context for understanding why Pescara, an otherwise modest city, holds such pride in its most famous son.