L'Italo-Americano

www.italoamericano.org 18 L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2019 his granddad would feel perfect- ly at ease in today's digital and robotic age, and "perhaps he could identify a further develop- ment," he says. "I bet Marinetti would have great pleasure meeting up with t e c h b i l l i o n a i r e s R i c h a r d Branson, Elon Musk and Jeff Besoz, to talk about their space travel projects and sub-orbital space tourism," he says. Marinetti owned the most powerful supercar of his time, but today would he consider electric cars the wheel of the future? Mr. Piazzoni Marinetti, who n e v e r m e t h i s g r a n d f a t h e r , r e c a l l s h i s m o t h e r V i t t o r i a repeating that her dad was a very present father and a very sweet man. He always did what he believed. He was the "caffeine of Europe" who traveled tirelessly throughout Europe, North Africa, and South America. He exulted over the outbreak of WWI as he declared in his 1915 book War - the Sole Hygiene of the World. But he was not a mere theorist or a windbag. He was no wimp: he went to war. In 1911, he arrived in Lybia as a war correspondent for a French newspaper, eventu- ally collecting his stories for the book The Battle of Tripoli. In 1912 and 1913, he covered war stories on the Bulgarian-Turkish front where he witnessed the bombing of Adrianople. In 1915, he was in active combat in the mountains of Trentino, together with Futurist artists Umberto Boccioni, Mario Sironi, Luigi Russolo, Antonio Sant'Elia, and Antonio Bucci. In 1935 and 1936, he fought in the Ethiopian war and his nar- rative of the Battle of Passo Uarieu was exposed in The African Poem of the "October 28" Division. Finally, in 1942 he served with the Axis forces on the Soviet front at age 66. The young Marinetti was a womanizer, but once he met a young painter named Benedetta Cappa at the atelier of Giacomo Balla in Rome, nothing was the same. "My grandparents loved each other truly. It was a great, immense love affair," says Piazzoni Marinetti. "Together they had three daughters: Vittoria, Ala, and Luce." He was a fascist and that's a fact. And even though he dis- tanced himself from the anti- Semitic metamorphosis of Fascism culminated in the racial laws of 1938 that led to the expulsion of Jews from almost every sector of Italian public life, the reality does not change. Yet, this does not mean that Futurism is a second- rate art. Boccioni, Balla, Severini, Sironi and Prampolini remain some of the most influential painters of modern art, not to mention the multimedia talent Fortunato Depero, who designed the iconic Campari Soda bottle, or the genius of Futurist music Luigi Russolo, whose influence on music and theater has been reflected by experimental per- formers from Anton Artaud to Laurie Anderson. To me, even William S. Burroughs's cut-up novels look as they have been built on the work of avant-garde pioneer Marinetti who, through his paro- le in libertà or words-in-free- dom, wanted to free words from syntax, and their societal and lin- guistic constraints. Futurism embodied processes and ideas that are still being developed. That speed, that inter- connection, that renovation never stopped in art and life. "You cannot love the founder of Spatialism Lucio Fontana or abstract painter Alberto Burri if you ignore the aesthetics of Futurism," Piazzoni Marinetti says. "Doesn't Burri's glorious obsession with matter come from Futurism?" Marinetti financed his artists for much of his life. "He was a patron and a tireless cultural pro- moter of modern Italian art." He also got funding for Futurism from Mussolini and put his own money to fund Fascism. This was the problematic con- nection that tainted his artistic recognition, his association with Mussolini, to whom he remained loyal until the end in the Republic of Salò. "We should explore Futurism without wearing the anti-fascist blinders that prevent us from see- ing," Piazzoni Marinetti says. There is a tendency to confuse art and politics. Will we one day be able to make that distinction? "Today, they are not," he says. "Still, there is no politician who would authorize an exhibi- tion room exclusively dedicated to Marinetti's art at the Milan's Museo del Novecento." "Milan, the city of Marinetti, should be the city of Futurism. The anti-fascist Milan never real- ly honored my grandfather instead," he says. "But I daresay Marinetti does not need those honors." He also explains that Marinetti and poet Gabriele D'Annunzio were not rivals but buddies. They always respected each other even when Marinetti called D'Annunzio "Un cretino con lampi di imbecillità" e D'Annunzio called the spiritual father of Futurism "Un fesso fosforescente." "D'Annunzio was a better poet but was a homunculus who lacked humanity. On the con- trary, Marinetti had considera- tion for others." The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University house The Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Papers consisting of correspon- dence, writings, photographs and diaries documenting the work of Marinetti and Futurism. More than a dozen Marinetti and Italian Futurism archives are kept at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. In Italy, there are collections at Mart (Contemporary and Modern Art Museum of Trento e Rovereto) and in Fiesole, at Fondazione Primo Conti. "It would be nice to establish in Italy a documentation center for Futurism to link all the exist- ing archives." Yes, to give someone credit means to give them praise. "Marinetti was a visionary who predicted how the future would develop in terms of machines, communication models and interpersonal relations" For Marinetti, poetry was not only made by the meaning and sound of words, but also by the way they were placed on the page and by the way they looked (Copyright: Mart. di Rovereto) Continued from page 16 HERITAGE HISTORY IDENTITY TRADITIONS

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