Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938) was an Italian patriot, poet, novelist and playwright. He was also, throughout his life, a passionate celebrant of greyhounds, which he saw as embodying many of the ideal qualities—inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche but frequently condemned as fascist—that he admired and sought to promote in human society. This chapter provides unusual biographical evidence of his canine obsession alongside a close reading of his novel The Fame (Il fuoco, 1900) in which the beauty, tenacity and intensity of the dogs are heavily featured. D’Annunzio’s evocations of the city of Venice lead to discussion of visual representations of the city by Paolo Veronese, in which dogs also appear, and of Albrecht Dürer’s great engraving entitled Melencolia I, with its haunting and inscrutable rendering of a dog clearly of the greyhound type.