The top picture is Gabriele d'Annunzio’s Flight over Vienna, the 1918 operation in which the Italian poet-adventurer led a biplane squadron on a unprecedented 700+ mile round trip to drop propaganda leaflets over the Austro-Hungarian capital - most famously mocking Italian poetry composed by il vate himself.

Like many of the military operations d'Annunzio conceived and executed during World War One, the raid was tactically brilliant, strategically pointless, yet still valuable in terms of raising morale and as proof-of-concept for developing doctrines of mechanized combat - in this case, strategic bombing.

The lower picture, of course, comes from the period after the war, when d'Annunzio personally conquered the city of Fiume and ruled it for over a year as pirate-king, pioneering the charismatic pageantry characteristic of later fascist regimes.