L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2019 www.italoamericano.org 16 L'Italo-Americano HERITAGE HISTORY IDENTITY TRADITIONS MARIELLA RADAELLI T h e r e a r e d i f f e r e n t reasons why some- t i m e s i n d i v i d u a l s and society can find it hard to praise the paternity of a new set of ideas whatsoever. In this specific case, it is a matter of fear of uttering a taboo term that perhaps rightful- ly so keeps evoking something cruel, unscrupulous and anti-lib- eral: Fascism. H o w e v e r , p e o p l e s h o u l d always try an honest approach to the truth. Shouldn't they render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's? For every good reason there is to lie, there is a better reason to tell the truth. F i l i p p o T o m m a s o Marinetti, poet and publisher, ideologue and dramatist, culture p r o m o t e r a n d f o u n d e r o f F u t u r i s m p a s s e d a w a y 7 5 y e a r s a g o , o n D e c e m b e r 2 , 1944, in Bellagio, Lake Como. Time moved: yet his contribu- tion to Art still gets obfuscated and mystified by political biases, easy stereotypes and cultural narrow mindedness that perceive offenses where none exists. Although Futurism, the first artistic avant-garde in Europe, would be short-lived, we are still reeling from its influence many decades later. And that is a reali- ty. Marinetti was a cosmopolitan p r o d i g y . B o r n i n 1 8 7 6 i n Alexandria, Egypt, where his father Enrico worked as a lawyer specialized in commercial con- t r a c t s f o r t h e S u e z C a n a l Company, he took a baccalau- r é a t i n 1 8 9 4 a t S o r b o n n e University, Paris, and later in 1899 earned a degree in law from the University of Genova. He was an Italian modernist rooted in Symbolism who grew up speaking French, Arabic and Italian. A lover of Italy, he wrote most of his poems in French and i n f u s e d h i s f a s c i n a t i o n w i t h Africa in his books including his first novel Mafarka le Futuriste. Although still living in an old-world, he perceived and por- trayed a new era that was rapidly approaching as a train coming up around the bend. He flirted with technology, in a w o r l d w h e r e d i s c o v e r i e s , inventions and technological achievements were not an opti- cal illusion. Electricity, the com- bustion engine, the light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the radio, X-rays were real. All this nascent technology fully broke and flooded his writ- ings that looked to the future. On 20 February 1909, his incen- diary Founding and Manifesto of Futurism appeared in Le Figaro. Using the metaphor of a car crash that he experienced at the w h e e l o f h i s l u x e I s o t t a F r a s c h i n i , t h e m a n i f e s t o announced the new aesthetic of speed. "A racing car," reads the manifesto's fourth paragraph, "whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot – i s m o r e b e a u t i f u l t h a n T h e Victory of Samothrace." M a r i n e t t i g l o r i f i e d t h e machine. He considered it a 'metaphysical force.' "We will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent e l e c t r i c m o o n s , " r e a d s t h e eleventh paragraph. "The greedy railway stations that devour s m o k e - p l u m e d s e r p e n t s ( . . . ) D e e p - c h e s t e d l o c o m o t i v e s whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to c h e e r l i k e a n e n t h u s i a s t i c crowd." I meet Marinetti's grandson, Filippo Piazzoni Marinetti, in Milan. We sit inside a historic pastry shop and talk. Milan was the epicenter of Futurism. It was theorized in M a r i n e t t i ' s a p a r t m e n t a t 2 3 Corso Venezia, at the corner of Via Senato. There, in 1905, he founded an international poetry magazine called Poesia that pub- lished European poets. A com- memorative plaque on the build- ing reads: "Da qui il movimento futurista lanciò la sua sfida al chiaro di luna specchiato nel Naviglio" (From here, Futurism launched its moonlit challenge to be mirrored in the Naviglio River). Marinetti recruited an array o f p a i n t e r s , p o e t s a n d d r a - maturges to express the energy and values of the machine age, and manifesto after manifesto was produced. Piazzoni Marinetti says that t h e F u t u r i s t s l o v e d t o e a t l a busecca (Milanese- style tripe) at his grandfather's home at Corso Venezia. The typical dish was cooked by the sisters Angelini, Marinetti's assistants. "My revolutionary grandfa- ther envisaged many aspects of t h e w o r l d t o b e , " h e s a y s . "Marinetti understood where modern man, modern life, would be located." I n h i s M a n i f e s t o o f Aeropainting (1929), he declared that painting is best done from an airplane. "The aeropittura was a radical, dynamic and mul- tiplicative form of art that led to spatial communication resulting today in that interconnected and invisible world of the internet and even the internet of things," says Piazzoni Marinetti. Today, drone art is to a cer- tain extent the germination of aeropainting. "Marinetti was a visionary who predicted how the future w o u l d d e v e l o p i n t e r m s o f machines, communication mod- els and interpersonal relations. He prognosticated about all the tech that makes everything so immediate." "In his writings, my grandfa- ther also expressed the concept of an entangled simultaneity that today we know thanks to the use of the internet." One of his plays that he renamed as Elettricità Sessuale featured the appearance onstage of humanoid automa- tons, ten years before the Czech writer Karel Čapek would coin the term 'robot'. Piazzoni Marinetti believes Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (centre): father of Futurism (Copyright Mart. di Rovereto) Marinetti: a velocity of being in the Futurism revolution Continued to page 18

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