This chapter examines the evolving critical reception of D’Annunzio at the turn of the twentieth century, situating his work within broader anxieties over national identity and cultural decline in post-Risorgimento Italy. The first section explores how early interpretations, particularly of Intermezzo di rime (1883) and Il piacere (1889), cast D’Annunzio as emblematic of Italy’s perceived moral and aesthetic decadence. The subsequent sections investigate his fin-de-siècle reception in France and his strategic efforts to reshape his public persona through transnational networks. By cultivating relationships with key French and Italian cultural mediators—including Georges Hérelle and Emilio Treves—D’Annunzio successfully imported laudatory French criticism into the Italian literary sphere. While celebrated abroad as a figure of European openness, D’Annunzio reappropriated this cosmopolitan image within a nationalist idiom, positioning himself as the herald of a new Renaissance. The final section traces the reception of this reframed identity, revealing persistent tensions between competing narratives of decadence and rebirth in both the author’s critical legacy and the broader currents of Italian cultural discourse.