The Vittoriale degli Italiani is the hillside estate of Gabriele D'Annunzio — poet, aviator, proto-fascist, and the most extravagantly self-mythologising figure in Italian cultural history. He lived here from 1921 until his death in 1938, and in that time transformed a pleasant lakeside villa into something between a museum, a mausoleum, and a private delirium. It is one of the stranger things you can visit in Italy, which is saying something.
The interior of the main house — the Prioria — is so densely packed with objects that the eyes take a moment to adjust. Every surface carries something: silk hangings, Venetian glass, maps, musical instruments, trophies, religious icons, books stacked floor to ceiling, and hundreds of objects accumulated over a lifetime of obsessive collecting. D'Annunzio kept the house in permanent semi-darkness, which adds to the claustrophobic effect. Guided tours take you through the principal rooms, including his study, his remarkable bathroom tiled in the style of a Roman bathhouse, and his bedroom, where he often slept on a low iron bed under a skull he kept as a memento mori.
The grounds are equally strange. The MAS torpedo boat he commanded during a World War I naval raid sits in the garden. Above the house, the prow of the cruiser Puglia has been mounted on the hillside with the rest of the ship in a dry dock nearby. There is an open-air amphitheatre, still used for summer performances, and at the summit, D'Annunzio's mausoleum, surrounded by the sarcophagi of his followers arranged in a ring. Allow at least two hours for the full estate. Tickets should be booked in advance in summer.