Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Alexandria, 1876 - Bellagio, 1944) was an Italian poet, playwright, editor and ideologue, and the founder of Futurism, Italy's first avant-garde movement. He wrote in French and Italian. His name belongs both to the literary renewal of the early twentieth century and to a political history that drew him close to Fascism.

He was born in Alexandria to a family of Piedmontese origin. His father was a lawyer who worked for foreign companies in Egypt. Marinetti was schooled by Jesuits in Alexandria, completed his secondary studies in Paris and took a law degree in Genoa in 1899, but he never wanted to practise. His childhood is hard to reconstruct, since his autobiographical writings tend toward myth. What is clear is that his brother's death in 1895 hit him hard, and that in 1902 he lost his mother, who had encouraged his early love of poetry.

His first verses appeared in French, in free verse, under the shadow of Mallarmé and above all D'Annunzio, whose success overshadowed the younger writer, making the relationship a complicated one. In 1905 he founded the Milan magazine Poesia, which introduced Italian readers to French and Belgian Symbolists.

The turning point came in 1908. After swerving his car into a ditch outside Milan to avoid two cyclists, he later recalled feeling like a new man when he climbed out. He set out to break with decadence and the Liberty style. The Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909, praised speed, machines, violence and war, and called for the destruction of museums and libraries. Its publication in the French daily Le Figaro gave it European reach. The Futurist evenings, full of proclamations and provocations, often ended in whistling, and Marinetti made provocation part of the programme.

His novel Mafarka il futurista (1910) led to an obscenity trial, from which he was acquitted. His play Elettricità sessuale featured humanoid automatons, about ten years before the Czech writer Karel Čapek popularised the word 'robot'. As a war correspondent he covered the Italo-Turkish War and the Balkan wars. During the First World War he served and was seriously wounded in 1917.

In the 1920s he drew closer to Fascism. He co-signed the Fascist Manifesto in 1919, became a member of the Academy of Italy and for a time was regarded as the regime's official poet, remaining loyal to Mussolini to the end. His legacy is ambiguous. His experiments with 'words in freedom' and his fascination with machines influenced Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, but his ties to Fascism still shape how he is judged.