Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Emilio

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Emilio (1876-1944), Italian writer and political activist, founder, and leader of Futurism.

Marinetti was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and was educated there and in Paris, Padua, and Genoa, receiving a law degree from the University of Genoa in 1899. He alternated periods of residence in France with periods in Italy and wrote in both French and Italian, starting with verses published in literary journals from 1898 onward and then in his own journal, Poesia (Poetry), from 1905. His early plays include Poupées Electriques (Electric Dolls, 1909), known in Italian as Elettricità Sessuale (Electric Sensuality), which presented robots on stage a decade before Karel Čapek introduced the word “robot”.

Marinetti’s “Manifeste du Futurisme” (Manifesto of Futurism, 1909) praises danger, energy, courage, and war, and denounces museums, universities, women, and conventional morality. Its themes were pursued in his novel Mafarka le Futuriste (Mafarka the Futurist, 1910) and in several short and experimental “synthetic” plays. The Futurist movement of artists and writers lingered on into the 1940s but had already split by 1915, when Marinetti welcomed World War I as the most beautiful Futurist poem so far, published a collection of poems entitled Guerra Sola Igiene del Mundo (War the Only Hygiene of the World), and joined the Italian army as an officer.

Marinetti joined the Fascist Party in 1919 and praised it as a natural extension of Futurism in his book Futurismo e Fascismo (Futurism and Fascism, 1924). He died in Bellagio on December 2, 1944.