Post-Unification cultural production depicts nation building as a kind of ideological work (political, literary) that produces hard-working national subjects. In both Leopoldo Franchetti's colonial biopolitics and Paolo Mantegazza's immunitary public health discourse, the production of Italians as vital subjects requires figures of labor productivity and racialized biological reproduction. Massimo D'Azeglio's famously ill- but nevertheless oft-cited dictum “We have made Italy, now we must make Italians” (“Si è fatta l'Italia, ma non si fanno gl'Italiani”) might thus be rethought in terms of how this production or ‘making’ (with an emphasis on the verb “fare”) is contingent upon other productivities: labor, biological, but also the discursive or aesthetic productivity of certain racial logics within the languages of liberal nationalism. Fin-de-siècle Italy's literary and political provocateur Gabriele D'Annunzio's early novelistic trilogy the Romanzi della rosa (1889–1894) further illustrates how sexual reproduction—and attendant figures not only of fecundity and prolificacy, but also female sterility and hereditary degeneracy—is a particularly dense site of rhetorical articulation in racial discourse. Critical to making Italians (fare gl'italiani), well before Mussolini's demographic policy and his more explicitly racist and imperialist projects, is a reproductive and racializing imperative, encapsulated by the admittedly much older expression fare razza, literally, “to make race,” or, in other words, “to reproduce.”

That biopolitics forges a relationship between the reproduction of the biological individual and the political collectivity has consequences for D'Annunzio's literary and political production—from the Romanzi della rosa to his Fiuman discourses (1919–1920)—given his avowed commitment in (not only) these works to hereditary genius, literary and biological genealogy, political spectacle, and/or territorial expansion expressed through physiological rhetoric. Reading the thematic trajectory of his physio-psychological Romanzi della rosa, it consists of three narratives that articulate a version of this relationship between subject and collectivity. Tracing the novels schematically reveals a sexually potent but non-reproductive male protagonist as the last representative of a family line (Il Piacere, 1889); a father threatened by biological and genealogical “intrusion” in the form of an adulterine fetus (L'Innocente, 1892); and a male protagonist who, plagued by monstrous heredity (from both “fathers,” from his sterile female partner, and from the biological community of the Abruzzi countryside, in Trionfo della morte, 1894), is forced to definitively remove himself (and his lover) from the genetic scene through homicide and suicide.