Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti
born Alexandria, Egypt, December 22, 1876; died Bellagio, Italy, December 2, 1944

“It seems that the officially registered name in Alexandria and Milan was never used. Marinetti himself gave his full name as Filippo Achille Giulio. His baccalaureate diploma is made out to Philippe Achille Emile, his doctorate diploma to Filippo, his military service card to Emilio. However, his family did not call him by any of these names: to them he was simply Tom.” — From “The Genesis of Futurism” by Günter Berghaus

Marinetti’s father was a lawyer from Piedmont who became adviser to the khedive of Alexandria and made a fortune speculating on Suez Canal Shares.  Marinetti claimed an early erotic attachment to his Sudanese nurse as one of the unique experiences of his childhood in Egypt.  Marinetti spoke Italian at home and French in school - first in Alexandria and later in Paris, where he took his baccalaureate in literature in 1893.

His mother and elder brother died in 1902, his father in 1907.  With the inherited family wealth, he bought a four-cylinder Fiat which he drove off the road one day in 1908 to avoid two cyclists. He emerged from the ditch as a Futurist.

– Or at least, that’s what he claimed.

Among many other talents, Marinetti had a gift for self-promotion, which made liberal use of exaggeration. Breathless hysteria would be a major feature of almost all Futurist rhetoric, starting with the Founding Manifesto published in February of 1909:

We must shake at the gates of life, test the bolts and hinges.

That penchant for agitation would be another hallmark of Marinetti’s movement. More than just about anything, he wanted to shake things up.

Later that year, Marinetti would produce a stage work, “The Feasting King”, which elicited heckles, whereupon Marinetti decided that causing the audience to boo would be a virtue for Futurists. They loved to see a riot break out, and often, if it didn’t happen on its own, they’d start it.

In 1911, Marinetti went to the front of the Libyan war as a correspondent. Marinetti also served as a war correspondent in the Balkans in 1912 and again during World War I. Marinetti saw war as a good thing. Italy had only unified itself five years before he was born, during the Risorgimento, and as a collection of wildly different states, Italy had no clear national identity. Marinetti’s fascination with war was largely a byproduct of his desire to see a clear Italianism emerge.

In 1915, he wrote of war as ‘the world’s only hygiene’:

For us today, Italy has the shape and power of a fine Dreadnought battleship with its squadron of torpedo-boat islands. Proud to feel that the marital fervor throughout the Nation is equal to ours, we urge the Italian government, Futurist at last, to magnify all the national ambitions, disdaining the stupid accusations of piracy, and proclaim the birth of Panitalianism.

By 1918, Marinetti had formed the Futurist Political Party, and the following year, he and Mussolini would get arrested together along with other Futurists after an electoral defeat. That same year saw the merger between Marinetti’s Futurist party and Mussolini’s Italian Fascist Party.

But for Marinetti, Mussolini wasn’t radical enough. The major through line in Marinetti’s life was a naive desire for instantaneous, radical change. In 1940, the New York Times doused his military rhetoric with a bucket of cold water:

“It is not news that an Italian Futurist poet, major Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, defended ‘the aesthetics and beauty of war’ in an address delivered this week before a Roman audience. It is news, and good news, that a part of the audience audibly signified before the lecture was over that enough was enough…The beauty of war is tanks in the mud…civilians blown to bits in Corfu, and, at home, dismay, forebodings and telegrams to the next of kin. No wonder Signor Marinetti’s audience grew restive.”

Through it all, Marinetti was relentlessly creative, staging plays, writing poems and novels and essays, curating a vast amount of art in a variety of mediums. Though Futurism was never a cult of personality, it was awfully close. Portraits of Marinetti by Futurist painters abound, and he was quick to label someone a member of his movement even when they had the most tangential of interest in it.

He died in 1944 in Bellagio on Lake Como after again serving his country for almost two years as a veteran volunteer on the Russian Front.

FURTHER READING
The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, by F.T. Marinetti
Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without Strings—Words-in-Freedom, by F.T. Marinetti
War, the World‘s Only Hygiene, by F.T. Marinetti
The Futurist Cinema, by F.T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, and Remo Chiti
The Futurist Aviator Speaks To His Father, Vulcan, by FT Marinetti
L’Aeroplano del Papa, by FT Marinetti