Gabriele D’Annunzio's Fiume escapade of 1919 has sometimes been incorporated into the story of nineteenth-century Italian irredentism described by Angelo Vivante in his 1914 Irredentismo Adriatico, where it serves as something of a coda to the Italo-Austrian conflict that ended with the First World War. It was also, however, a transitional episode, setting the stage for Italy's long and troubled relationship with the independent territories that would become Yugoslavia and, subsequently, its successor states. In this context, a number of figures, objects of art, culture and political life would change locations, crossing from one shore to the other, sometimes in forced migrations. Their stories became a staple of Italian and Yugoslav life for some three generations.

This chapter explores a single, somewhat unlikely example, in the form of the ‘maraschino’ cherry brandy for which the city of Zara, today's Zadar of Croatia, was once renowned. Specifically, it follows the life trajectory of the Luxardo brand begun by the entrepreneur Girolamo Luxardo in 1821, which bears a name worth exploring in the context of D’Annunzio's worldwide notoriety. This name is announced on the bottle itself, where, just beneath ‘Cherry Brandy’, one finds the words Sangue Morlacco, below which appears this explanatory phrase: ‘Il liquore cupo che alla mensa di Fiume chiamavo “Sangue Morlacco”’, (the dark liqueur that I called ‘Morlach's blood’ at the Fiume mess hall), which is followed by D’Annunzio's flowing signature. The history of this coinage, which is associated with the Luxardo family, their company and the long afterlife of D’Annunzio's Fiume adventure, provides an opportunity for exploring D’Annunzio's perceived cultural authority, especially for Italians displaced from Istria and Dalmatia following the Second World War, as well as the stereotypes and cultural assumptions of Italians vis-a-vis their eastern neighbours. As Noel Malcolm has shown in his Agents of Empire, trading families often served as the primary conduits for crossings of commerce, culture and politics over centuries of Adriatic life. This was no less true of the D’Annunzios and the Luxardos.