His conception of style was new, and he chose to express all the most subtle vibrations of voluptuous life. Intermezzo di rime is the beginning of D'Annunzio's second and characteristic manner. Canto novo contains poems full of pulsating youth and the promise of power, some descriptive of the sea and some of the Abruzzese landscape, commented on and completed in prose by Terra vergine, the latter a collection of short stories dealing in radiant language with the peasant life of the author's native province.

He published Canto novo (1882), Terra vergine (1882), L'intermezzo di rime (1883), Il libro delle vergini (1884) and the greater part of the short stories that were afterwards collected under the general title of San Pantaleone (1886). In those university years he started to promote Italian irredentism. In 1881 D'Annunzio entered the University of Rome La Sapienza, where he became a member of various literary groups, including Cronaca Bizantina, and wrote articles and criticism for local newspapers. His verse was distinguished by such agile grace that Giuseppe Chiarini on reading them brought the unknown youth before the public in an enthusiastic article. Influenced by Giosuè Carducci's Odi barbare, he posed side by side some almost brutal imitations of Lorenzo Stecchetti, the fashionable poet of Postuma, with translations from the Latin. He published his first poetry while still at school at the age of sixteen - a small volume of verses called Primo Vere (1879).

Il piacere by Gabriele d'Annunzio