Guido Keller, aviator, aesthete and man of action, instigator of lightning strikes, piratical feats and sensational japes, and follower of the health/naturist movement, as well as disdainer of uniforms and bourgeois clothes, was the only one of the young legionnaires present in Fiume allowed to use the familiar ‘tu’ form of address with D’Annunzio.
Keller prepared for and animated the Fiume undertaking with his genial enthusiasm for hatching plans. With his acute, penetrating, witty, pensive spirit, he possessed the Futurist talent for demolition and mockery. He knew the frenzy of action and the superior calm of the purely cerebral. As an imaginative, bantering character, he loved life, and took pleasure from playing with things and people, and inventing paradoxical entertainments. (...) He was known for carrying out reconnaissance missions in his fighter plane, dressed in his pyjamas. Bruno recalls sees him on a few occasions, after a risky flight, lying under a tree completely naked, engrossed in a newspaper or book. On board his plane there was always a little tea set, and flowers, cigarettes and tins of biscuits: it was a genuine flying drawing room. |
[in Fiume] He established the "Yoga", a group of the most daring, intelligent and modernist men in the Holocaust. This association planned and carried out bold feats, and pledged support for the Irish revolution and the nationalist movements in India, Turkey, Egypt and Montenegro.
On 14 November 1920 on board a single-seater SVA, he flew over Rome to drop three “messages” to the Vatican, the Quirinal and Montecitorio respectively, with the aim of furthering the Fiume cause.
“Having reached my destination I offered red roses to Frate Francesco at the Vatican, over the Quirinal I dropped more red roses for the Queen and the People, as a love token. On Montecitorio I threw an enamelled iron utensil attached to a strip of red cloth, with some turnips tied to the handle and a message: Guido Keller – Action in Splendour Wing – gives to Parliament and the Government that has been ruling on lies and fear for some time, a tangible allegory of their worth. Rome, 14th of the third month of the Regency.”
The tangible allegory naturally referred to the «enamelled iron utensil» an object for intimate use which is no longer in fashion today.
(Igino Mencarelli, Guido Keller, Ufficio storico dell’Aeronautica, 1970)
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