page_title: Guido Keller
section_title: The seizure of Fiume
hierarchical_section_title: Guido Keller / The seizure of Fiume
caption_attribution_description: English: Guido Keller posing as Neptune
context_page_description: Guido Keller was an Italian aviator and political activist who was closely associated with Gabriele D’Annunzio and played an important role in the seizure of Fiume in 1919.
context_section_description: On 12 September 1919 a column of around a thousand irregular troops commanded by Gabriele D’Annunzio marched into Fiume, whose annexation to Italy was opposed by US President Woodrow Wilson. This adventure was the beginning of the Regency of Carnaro, and D’Annunzio named Keller “Secretary for Action” and head of the “Ufficio Colpi di Mano”, commonly known as the “Uscocchi”. These units were named after medieval pirates of the Adriatic, the Uskoks, and their role was to secure the weapons and supplies needed by D’Annunzio's regime, resorting in many cases to outright piracy.
  Keller was responsible for acts of piracy and theft, such as the occasion when he stole a pig and loaded it onto his plane. The animal was so heavy that it broke through the bottom of his fuselage and he landed with its legs sticking out.  Keller carried a tea set with biscuits on his plane, contributing to his reputation as a refined dandy.
  As a protest against the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo, he flew over Rome in an Ansaldo SVA biplane to drop bouquets of flowers on the Vatican and Quirinale hills, as a gesture of homage, as well as an enamelled chamber-pot with a bunch of carrots and turnips on Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Chamber of Deputies, as a gesture of contempt, with a message attached that read “To the parliament and government based on lies and fear, the allegorical embodiment of their value.” During the return flight bad weather forced him to land and when peasants came to his assistance he discovered that he had inadvertently landed in the Republic of San Marino. Welcomed by the authorities there he improvised a message from D’Annunzio to the Italian government before securing diplomatic credentials from the republic that allowed him to return freely to Fiume, bypassing the blockade imposed by the Italian army.
  Keller was the only one of D’Annunzio's companions permitted to address him using the familiar personal pronoun ‘tu’.  While in Fiume he also became a friend of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who introduced him to futurism, which interested him for a time before he became disillusioned.
  With his friend the writer Giovanni Comisso, Keller founded a yoga group in Fiume, which adopted the swastika as one of its symbols. The group had esoteric and naturist tendencies and Keller was often portrayed nude in photos of the time. He slept semi-nude at the top of a tree together with his pet eagle. A habitual user of cocaine, he was also a devotee of group sex, including with male partners.
caption: Guido Keller posing as Neptune
exif: {}