Abstract

Hungary’s close relation to the port city of Fiume went back to 1779 when Empress Maria Theresa attached Fiume to the Crown of Hungary as «corpus separatum». From 1868 onwards, due to a Croatian-Hungarian Settlement, the town of Fiume belonged as «separatum coronae adnexum corpus» to the Crown of Hungary, a pact which remained in force for fifty years until the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918. This article aims to analyze the Hungarians’ perspective both on the city of Fiume and on d’Annunzio as intellectual and politician. In doing so, some testimonies and memories on the period of d’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume as well as interviews given by d’Annunzio to Hungarian journalists will be scrutinized. The paper aims also to explore the reasons for the relative paucity of the contacts between d’Annunzio and the Hungarian avant-garde circles by considering the interwar Hungary cultural and political context.