Having fallen in battle on 28 May 1917, he was at the centre of D'Annunzio's liturgy during the Fiume adventure.

Two months after taking possession of Fiume, Gabriele d'Annunzio once again caused concern and uproar among the liberal Italian ruling class: with a flotilla of ships from the Royal Navy, which had deserted to support his effort to annex Carnaro to Italy, the Poet presented himself in Zara, the capital of that Dalmatia which the London Pact of 1915 had assured to Rome and which in that autumn of 1919 instead seemed destined to become part of the newly born Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

While waiting for the decisions of the Peace Conference, a Military Governorate was in force, headed by Admiral Enrico Millo, who did not hesitate to express, in accordance with the wishes of the leaders of the Italian war fleet, the need to annex the entire eastern Adriatic coast (even though the Italian community represented a minority compared to the Croatian and Serbian component) in order to guarantee the domination of those waters.

Instead of treating d'Annunzio like a deserter, Millo had lunch with him. Then the two harangued the crowd gathered in front of the Governor's Palace: at the culminating moment of his speech, the Commander of Fiume unfurled a Tricolour visibly stained with blood, involving the already enthusiastic audience in a moment of solemn sacredness. It was the flag that had wrapped the body of Major Giovanni Randaccio, a Piedmontese irredentist who fell in war exactly one hundred years ago. A martyr for the cause of national unification, who had as his shroud the tricolour flag (also waved several times during the Fiume rallies), the crowd and its demagogue: they were all components of the Religion of the Fatherland.

Randaccio died in battle on May 28, 1917, deserving the Gold Medal for Military Valor in Memory, which came after three Silver Medals earned in the first months of the war, during which he had been promoted on the field and had suffered a very serious wound. The tenth battle of the Isonzo was raging at the time and Randaccio had attempted a very difficult offensive mission at the mouth of the Timavo River, a few kilometers from Trieste, with the aim of occupying the ruins of the Duino Castle. At that point, however, the Austro-Hungarian defenses, centered on the natural fortress of Mount Ermada, were particularly robust. Nonetheless, also encouraged by his friend D'Annunzio - who had once carried out an air raid on that sector of the front - Randaccio decided to lead the unit of the 77th Regiment of the "Toscana" Brigade commanded by him to the assault on the Bratina heights. The position was conquered at the cost of enormous losses and the reaction of the imperial-royal troops was not long in coming: reinforcements to consolidate the conquest did not arrive and the Austrian machine guns wreaked havoc, also fatally wounding Randaccio.

Two days later, d'Annunzio held his friend's funeral oration in the cemetery of Monfalcone, helping to create an aura of sacredness around his figure. Today, at the spot where the tragic end of the not yet thirty-three-year-old officer from Turin (to whom the nearby Trieste aqueduct is named) took place, a memorial stone commemorates his desperate sacrifice. Nearby, a bronze sculpture depicts wolves: they are the "Wolves of Tuscany", an epithet that the infantrymen of the Tuscan Brigade earned for the ardour they demonstrated on the battlefield.

Committee February 10, July 13, 2017