These lines, which so cleverly and concisely summarise D’Annunzio's varying and ambiguous achievements, were written in July 1942 by the poet, theatre practitioner and convinced Communist Bertolt Brecht – an author one would struggle to identify as a D’Annunzio admirer. Indeed, Brecht himself was the literary hero and friend of none other than Walter Benjamin, who in his essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935/6), named D’Annunzio as one of the primary instances of the ‘aestheticizing of politics’ practised by Fascism, grouping him with Marinetti and Hitler. Despite their evident ideological differences, Brecht showed surprising respect for D’Annunzio's work, defining his 1923 Maritime Workers Union Charter, the Patto marinaro that regulated the rights of seafarers following the libertarian principles of Fiume's ‘Carta del Carnaro’, as an ‘interesting document’. He also extended D’Annunzio a certain ‘feudal dignity’. And while there is no evidence that he even knew Italian, Brecht's fascination with D’Annunzio's poetry was such that he went as far as translating into German, probably using another German version or a French intermediary translation, one of D’Annunzio's most iconic poems, ‘La pioggia nel pineto’ – a work that can certainly be grouped amongst the aestheticising literary feats of the Italian fin-de-siècle. D’Annunzio's ‘vanity’, ‘taste’ and ‘lifestyle’ all align, in Brecht's reading, with the unforgettable verse that makes this ‘charlatan’ a figure of interest and importance.