Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in full Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti, Italian-French prose writer, novelist, poet, and dramatist, the ideological founder of Futurism, an early 20th-century literary, artistic, and political movement.
Background
Emilio Angelo Carlo Marinetti (some documents give his name as "Filippo Achille Emilio Marinetti") spent the first years of his life in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father (Enrico Marinetti) and his mother (Amalia Grolli) lived together more uxorio (as if married). His love for literature developed during the school years. At age seventeen he started his first school magazine, Papyrus; the Jesuits threatened to expel him for publicizing Emile Zola's scandalous novels in the school.
Education
He first studied in Egypt then in Paris, obtaining a baccalauréat degree in 1894 at the Sorbonne,[1] and in Italy, graduating in law at the University of Pavia in 1899.He decided not to be a lawyer but to develop a literary career. He experimented with every type of literature (poetry, narrative, theatre, words in liberty), signing everything "Filippo Tommaso Marinetti".
Career
In 1911, the Italo-Turkish War began and Marinetti departed for Libya as war correspondent for a French newspaper. His articles were eventually collected and published in The Battle Of Tripoli. He also made a number of visits to London, which he considered 'the Futurist city par excellence', and where a number of exhibitions, lectures and demonstrations of Futurist music were staged.During the Fascist regime Marinetti sought to make Futurism the official state art of Italy but failed to do so.Marinetti volunteered for active service in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and the Second World War, serving on the Eastern Front, despite his advanced age.
Politics
Marinetti was one of the first affiliates of the Italian Fascist Party. In 1919 he co-wrote with Alceste De Ambris the Fascist Manifesto, the original manifesto of Italian Fascism.[6] He opposed Fascism's later exaltation of existing institutions, terming them "reactionary," and, after walking out of the 1920 Fascist party congress in disgust, withdrew from politics for three years. However, he remained a notable force in developing the party philosophy throughout the regime's existence.