This chapter reconstructs D’Annunzio’s ethnonationalist appropriation of the Renaissance within the broader context of Italian and European debates on modernity, decadence, and cultural rebirth. The first section traces how Italian intellectuals such as Bertrando Spaventa and Francesco De Sanctis challenged dominant nineteenth-century critiques—shaped by Hegelian and Wagnerian valorizations of the Reformation as Europe’s moral and cultural origin—by asserting the Renaissance’s scientific legacy as equally foundational to modernity. Against this intellectual backdrop, the chapter then examines D’Annunzio’s Il fuoco (1900) as a direct response to Wagnerian narratives, in which he counters German-Protestant models of cultural renewal with an alternative vision of Latin humanism and individualism as the true engine of civilizational rebirth. The chapter then opens out onto a broader analysis of D’Annunzio’s engagement with the Latin–Germanic opposition and his project of modern anthropopoiesis. By casting Italy as the spiritual and cultural cradle of a new Europe, D’Annunzio theorized the creation of a new man rooted in Renaissance ideals. This reimagined Renaissance figure, he proposed, would lead a revitalized Italo-European modernity by fusing inherited cultural tradition with a future-oriented ethos of regeneration.