Rome

perfunctory affairs of his long amatory career. Women were still falling over one another to reach his bed. It never occurred to D’Annunzio that men should not live off women. Bernard Berenson, who knew D’Annunzio somewhat, liked to tell the story of a silver-haired, highly respectable, and immensely rich American woman of advancing years who, seized with the desire to add D’Annunzio to her conquests, let the poet know (through a go-between) that she would pay most generously for a night with him. The poet’s response was to ask, “Is she white all over?”

The D’Annunzian style strongly affected both Futurism and Fascism. Futurism was a culture-bound movement with pretensions to affect everyday life. Its leader was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—“the caffeine of Europe,” as he liked to style himself. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1876. His father, Enrico, was a successful corporate lawyer who lived with, but never married, his mother, Amalia Grolli. Unlike most of the poets, musicians, and artists in his circle, he was never short of money. For him, private income meant freedom, as it does for most people lucky enough to have one: he never had to swerve from the self-appointed mission of changing the world merely in order to earn a crust, and his attacks on middle-class complacency were made all the bolder by his own class security. As the ringmaster of cultural novelty in Europe, he needed to be everywhere—not only Rome, where he and his family kept a large apartment, but Paris, Saint Petersburg and Moscow, Zurich, Berlin, London, and especially Milan, his chosen home. Such mobility cost money, and Marinetti was one of the few modernists—certainly the only Italian one—who had plenty of it.

He had been schooled by Jesuits, which may well have contributed to his sense of confident exception. This was confirmed when his Jesuit teachers expelled him for cultural rowdiness: he had been passing around copies of Zola’s realist novels.

Another factor which seems to have put him at an angle (as one may mildly call it) to middle-class assumptions was his affiliation with Africa, through his Egyptian childhood. Marinetti deeply wanted to be seen as an exotic, and he played it up. “Vulgare Greciae dictum,” Pliny the Elder had written in his Natural History, “Semper aliquid novi Africam adferre”: “It is commonly said by Greeks that something new is always coming out of Africa.” This could well have been Marinetti’s motto, and it explains the frequent references to the prowess of “Negroes” (as he called Africans, in the usage of the day) in his writings. Africans were imagined as tough, energetic, fearless, and never at a loss when it came to surprising and disconcerting Europeans. They were, in that sense, natural avant-gardists, which was how Marinetti saw himself. Unlike Picasso, Matisse, or Derain, he was never influenced by the “primitive” art of Africa. He was a writer and performer, not a painter. It is quite possible, though, that there was a link between the languages and chants of the Dark Continent, as imagined by Marinetti and other intellectuals, and the nonsense onomatopoeia of “words-in-freedom” that was to become an important part of Marinetti’s poetic strategies. Like some other Europeans who wanted to display their difference from the common herd, he liked the bone-in-the-nose, ooga-wooga picture of African savagery.

His father sent him to Paris to study for his baccalaureat, which he got in 1893. Then he came back to Italy and enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the University of Genoa, from which he graduated in 1899. But he was never to practice law. Instead, he lived the life of a young literary flaneur, writing poems, essays, plays, and, with increasing regularity and skill, practicing journalism in Italian and French. More and more, he gravitated toward literary and artistic circles in Rome, Turin, and Milan.

The movement called Futurism was launched with an essay written in French by Marinetti and published, as befitted its international intent, in Paris in 1909. From then on, the production of manifestos was going to be Marinetti’s chief art form: nobody in the European cultural world, except for D’Annunzio, had a stronger instinctive talent for publicity or could excel him at hectoring.

Certain images recur in his work, and in that of his fellow Futurists. They are almost all mechanical, and polemically modern. “The world’s magnificence,” he wrote,

has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car, whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot, is more beautiful than the

Victory of Samothrace.

For many people, this is now true. At the very least, it is not difficult, more than a century after this manifesto was written, to find both the sculpture and the machine beautiful, though not in the same way. But in 1909, such sentiments seemed, to cultivated Europeans who read them, blasphemous and almost diabolical—they amounted to a contradiction of the “proper” order of aesthetic experience, because the car was not beautiful at all, whereas the sculpture was nothing but beautiful.

The car, object of what one writer called “autolatry,” was the prime Futurist icon, the emblem, the spectacular object of desire. The only thing that compared to it was the airplane, then (in 1910) in its very early, pioneering stage of development, the Wright brothers having achieved heavier-than-air flight under power in 1903. The airplane of early Futurist dreams was merely a Bleriot monoplane, of the kind that had recently made it across the English Channel. Trains and fast motorboats also figured, but they never approached the automobile, whose rapid progress under personal control (or lack of it) seemed to Marinetti and other Futurists to confirm the belief of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), one of their favorite philosophical writers, that reality was in constant flux: car travel presented the driver and passengers with one level of experience rapidly overlapping another, so that the total impression had more to do with collage than with a static view. Consequently, Futurist writing and painting, when it turned to cars, was always highly personal—the “I” is in the driver’s seat—and invariably centered on exhilarated feelings of directional energy and rapid change. Needless to say, this arose at a point in history, around the first decade of the century, when the roads were clear of other cars and that emblem of automotive culture, the traffic jam, did not yet exist. What can it have been like to drive a fast car around an Italian city, at night, in those days before the invention of the traffic light? Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto tells us his version, in a stream of Mr. Toad–like rantings.

It is 1908. He has been up late into the night with two friends, automaniacs like himself, bloviating about life and culture, when they hear “the famished roar of automobiles.” “ ‘Let’s go!’ I said. ‘Friends, away! Let’s go!…We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and, soon after, the first flight of Angels!…We must shake the gates of life, test the bolts and hinges.’ ” This kind of rodomontade would rank high on anyone’s list of Invocations That Were Probably Never Invoked (though, with Marinetti, it is hard to be sure): in any case, they are soon down at their cars, the “three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts.” Off they go, vroom-vroom, in a sort of mechano-sexual delirium. “Like young lions we ran after Death.… There was nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at last from the weight of our courage!” But, alas, some cyclists appear, blocking the road; and Marinetti and his leonine friends have to avoid them. His car plunges upside down into a ditch, baptizing Marinetti in sacramental filth. “O maternal ditch … Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse.… When I came up … from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!”

There is more, much more, in this vein; no one could accuse Marinetti of terseness. One can have a certain sympathy with the annoyed Italian writer who, when asked if he didn’t agree that Marinetti was a genius, retorted, “No, he’s a phosphorescent cretin,” but in fact he was less than the first but a good deal more than the second. Sometimes he could be perfectly idiotic, as in his call to glorify war, “the world’s only hygiene,” along with militarism, and patriotism; or in his ludicrous exhortations to fill the canals of Venice with the rubble of its demolished palaces. “Let’s Kill the Moonlight” was the title of one of his more famous anti-romantic manifestos. And