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This article charts the rise to fame of Gabriele D’Annunzio by focusing on a number of key moments in his life and the strategies he employed to shape his public image. The Roman years and the 1890s saw the writer’s first iconic transformation into Italy’s aesthete par excellence, a myth and related iconography that still shapes our view of the poet. The years in Florence, spent at the Villa Capponcina, coincided with the time in which d’Annunzio re-fashioned himself into a self-appointed national poet. The war years were central to the creation of an entirely new figure, the poeta soldato, whose military heroics and charismatic leadership provided novel and dubious models of engagement with contemporary politics and culture. Finally the years of the self-imposed exile at Gardone focus on the late, and as yet undocumented, use of photographs employed by d’Annunzio to keep the myth of the national poet-soldier alive under Fascism. These subsequent transformations resulted in a highly successful and thoroughly modern staging of his personality which turned him into a national icon.

The four quarterly numbers of Italian Studies that will be published in 2020 mark the seventy-fifth issue of the journal. To mark the occasion, the Senior Editors decided to commission a set of collaboratively produced articles for a Special Issue dedicated to 'Key Directions in Italian Studies'. For Volume 75 of the journal, the moment seemed right to invite colleagues to join us for an examination of areas of research that we view as representative of the state of the art in 2020 of Italian Studies as a discipline and key to its future development. We sought to identify several broad thematic areas that are currently particularly productive across the arc of research fields and methods that the journal addresses, seeking to open dialogues between our contributors and our readers that could produce a long view and broad spread of discussion relating to the selected research areas.An important consideration was to identify topics that were not confined by traditional chronological divides but could put researchers in the early period into contact with researchers in the modern period, for the purposes of producing collaboratively written articles addressing their shared areas of expertise, and offering fruitful reflections for readers active in the many and diverse fields that make up contemporary Italian Studies as a discipline or set of disciplinary and methodological concerns.Each of the articles in this Special Issue is the result of collaborative dialogue between two or three scholars, who were invited to shape their response to the argument proposed in the way that seemed most fruitful to the writing team. They were asked to reflect, of course, on what they felt to be the particular contribution made by Italian Studies

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