Among the works of art, a machine. An Italian machine. At the center of the last room of the exhibition “Le Temps du Futurisme”, inaugurated at the Nazional Galleria of Arte Moderna (Gnam) in Rome, in December 2024, sits, among the paintings of the Italian avant-garde painters at the start of the XXe century, an imposing red hydravion. This is a scale replica of the Macchi-Castoldi MC 72, which allowed the Italian trotting Francesco Agello to win the world speed record in 1934, reaching 711 km/h.
Italian futurism was born twenty-five years before this feat, in 1909, in the pages of Figaro : that year, the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) published, in the French newspaper, the manifesto of the futuristic movement. “We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and recklessness”he proclaims with emphasis. It is to this movement that the exhibition organized in Rome, one of the major cultural projects of the extreme Italian right, pays homage.
Because of the fascist part of its inheritance, futurism has long been the subject – without being completely rejected – of a certain suspicion within republican Italy. The government dominated by the extreme right of Giorgia Meloni intends today to rehabilitate him as part of his cultural policy: he wishes to integrate into the national account of figures and currents which, according to him, was ignored too long.
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Source: Lemonde