Lucia Re

Maria Ginanni vs. F. T. Marinetti:

Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy

Experimentation, Gender, Time, Space, and Speed in Wartime Futurism

E ven before it was published as a volume, F. T. Marinetti’s Come si

seducono le donne became the object of a lively debate on the pages of
L’Italia futurista, the principal wartime Futurist journal, published in Florence
from June 1, 1916 to February 11, 1918. The debate was stirred by previews and
publicity, and included reactions by Futurist women that were hardly positive.1
The need was generally felt among the contributors to appear undivided in time
of war, and loyal to the Futurist leader who was then at the front (or in the
hospital recovering from wounds); yet a number of interventions published by
L’Italia futurista, including articles by Rosa Rosà and Enif Robert, were openly
critical of Marinetti’s book. The controversy soon turned into a wider discussion
on woman, gender, and war, which took off on its own and became a prominent
feature of the journal. Not only was there a semi-regular column devoted to the
“woman question,” but issues of gender emerged often on the journal’s pages
over the three years during which it was published. This was due in part to the
participation of women, a new phenomenon in the cultural history of Italy.
A reading of the articles by Rosà and Robert, and of the multiple other
clashing interventions, indicates that interpreters of L’Italia futurista have
underestimated or misrepresented the journal’s richly conflictual and
multifaceted nature in the context of the war years. Critics have tended to
emphasize cohesiveness and a “group spirit” among the editors and contributors
of L’Italia futurista, but this was really only a front.2 At the same time, they
have minimized the importance of women’s interventions, and of the debate on
woman, which has usually been seen as marginal or uninteresting.3 A non-
conflictual, homogenizing reading of L’Italia futurista is indeed possible only if
women’s contributions and the question of gender are ignored or cut out of the

1
Among the previews and anticipations, see Settimelli’s “Marinetti e la seduzione, delle
donne.” About Come si seducono le donne, see Re.
2
For a more insightful assessment of the conflictual nature of the journal, see Dondi.
3
See Papini’s introduction to her anthology 51. Most of the women’s contributions and
the debate on woman are not anthologized; only brief summaries are included. The only
reader who considers women’s contributions essential is Stelio M. Martini in “Le novità
de L’Italia futurista” (Caruso 1: 53-56); this brief essay does not, however, provide any
analysis. See also in the same volume the useful comments by Bandini (17-18).
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 2

picture. Other critics instead have objected to the journal’s lack of cohesiveness,
its eclecticism, and its failure to be rigorous and selective in terms of literary
quality.4 The latter is an argument that — only thinly disguised — resuscitates
standard objections in Italian culture to women’s writing, whose value was
traditionally thought to be inferior, appropriate only for popular or “mass”
literature. Yet the intention of L’Italia futurista was precisely to distance itself
from traditional notions of art and even from previous forms of elitist
experimentalism by opening up to a wide variety of contributors and readers,
including women, common soldiers, and members of the youngest generations.
The significance and originality of L’Italia futurista can in fact be fully grasped
only by highlighting the question of gender, for it was a central rather than
marginal aspect of the journal, and it had key repercussions on several levels
involving the social and political meaning of the war as well as the cultural
history of the avant-garde.
The journal displayed the heightened and new creative interdisciplinarity of
Futurism, and promoted the formation of new gender configurations as well as
new genres, and the contamination of the esthetic with other codes. Drawings
and texts by well-known first-generation Futurists such as Balla, Boccioni,
Soffici, Cangiullo, Balilla Pratella and Folgore were published in L’Italia
futurista along with those of new, younger Futurists, as well as works by rising
stars, such as Depero, who were unknown and previously unpublished at the
time, from different social classes and backgrounds, and (although the journal
was published in Florence) from all over Italy, including the South. The journal
is often referred to as the organ of second-wave “Florentine futurism,” yet of the
founding editors only Emilio Settimelli (and almost none of the contributors)
was from Florence. Mario Carli was from near Foggia (in the Puglie region of
southern Italy), Remo Chiti was from Staggia Senese, and the Ginanni-Corradini
brothers (futuristically nicknamed Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna) were from
Ravenna. Irma Valeria, although born in Verona, had settled in Ravenna in
1916. Ravenna’s Byron hotel and the Ginannis’ house were the first gathering
place of the group, which included the brilliant Maria Ginanni (born Maria
Crisi), married to Ginna.5 Born in Naples in 1891, Ginanni had studied
mathematics at the university of Rome, and her “brain” as well as her
authoritativeness in literary and political matters became one of the journal’s

4
In his prefatory note to Papini’s anthology, Ramat judges the entire journal to be
derivative and devoid of any real interest or depth beyond the celebratory rhetoric of
wartime patriotism and praise of Marinetti’s genius (Papini 27).
5
A brief biographical sketch by G. B. Nazzaro inexplicably titled “Maria Crisi” (rather
than Maria Ginanni) may be found in Il dizionario del futurismo. Nazzaro claims that
Ginanni and Ginna were not married. See also the biographical entry on Maria Ginanni in
Bello Minciacchi 87-90.
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 3

recurrent themes.6 The geographical and generational diversity mirrored that of

the war itself, which had for the first time brought together at the front (and in
organizations that supported the war effort on the home front) Italians of all ages
from all over the peninsula. Some of L’Italia futurista’s authors, for example
Primo Conti and the actress and writer Fulvia Giuliani, who had been recruited
by Maria Ginanni and contributed many subtly ironic and parodic prose poems,
were extraordinarily young, only sixteen or seventeen. The war seemed to
compress and accelerate time, forcing everyone to move and grow up more
quickly; many soldiers who died at the front in the last two years of war were
not yet eighteen. Primo Conti, who was born in 1900, became briefly the editor
of the journal in 1918. Fulvia Giuliani, who eventually went on to become a
leading actress in Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s underground Teatro degli
Indipendenti in Rome in the 1920s, had gone on the stage for the first time in
variety shows organized in hospitals by the Red Cross, where she performed in
comic vignettes that were her own creations.
Besides the founding editors, the core group of contributors, sometimes
dubbed “la pattuglia azzurra” (the sky-blue or azure platoon), included Maria
Ginanni, Irma Valeria, Primo Conti, Lucio Venna and the artist Vieri Nannetti
(author of tavole parolibere as well as delightful caricatures and satirical
drawings). Along with Ginanni, Valeria, Giuliani, Enif Robert, and Rosa Rosà
(whose real name was Edyth von Haynau: she was a native of Vienna), the
women who published in L’Italia futurista were Shara Marini, Magamal (Eva
Khün Amendola, from Lithuania), Mina Della Pergola, Enrica Piubellini, Fanny
Dini, Emma Marpillero, Maria D’Arezzo and Mary Carbonaro.7 It was a very
diverse, heterogeneous group. Women futurist writers and artists emerged
during the war (after the pioneering, controversial futurist manifestoes by
Valentine de Saint-Point),8 but they did not organize themselves into a militant
subgroup of futurism, nor did they constitute their own female avant-garde or
feminist collective. Rather, they worked for the most part as individuals, yet
influencing each other through their texts, and through conversation and
friendship. Provoked, challenged, inspired, often encouraged (and often
appalled) by Marinetti and the other male futurists, these women went on to

6
See, for example, Settimelli’s “Primo bilancio di Montagne trasparenti,” in which he
rhapsodizes about Ginanni’s brain. Biographical information about Ginanni is scarce and
sometimes contradictory, as is often the case with Futurist women. In his biographical
sketch, Nazzaro asserts that Ginanni,, although she studied mathematics at the university
of Rome, “never succeeded in graduating,” implicitly doubting her otherwise widely
admired intelligence and calling her “irrequieta.” See also the more even-handed
comments in Bello Minciacchi 87.
7
Selections from their work published in L’Italia futurista have been reproduced in the
anthologies edited by Claudia Salaris and Cecilia Bello Minciacchi.
8
“Il manifesto della donna futurista” (1912) and “Il manifesto futurista della lussuria”
(1913). See Bello Minciacchi 47-62.
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 4

create not a movement per se, but their own creative identities, which were often
very versatile, and of an astounding range. Fulvia Giuliani and Enif Robert, for
example, were both actresses and writers. Rosà was a painter, book illustrator,
poet and novelist. Women’s writing and art work, especially by Ginanni, Rosà
and Robert, were often prominently displayed on the front page of L’Italia
futurista. Rosà’s abstract drawing “Conflagrazione geometrica,” for example,
appeared on the front page of the October 7, 1917 issue, just below her article
“Le donne del posdomani” (a feminist manifesto of sorts), which was printed
next to Robert’s essay “Una parola serena.” The journal also solicited on
occasion the opinions of established female writers and critics who were not
Futurists, but clearly commanded the attention of female readers in Italy,
including Ada Negri, Grazia Deledda and Margherita Sarfatti. Widening the
scope of what was considered “Futurist,” L’Italia futurista as a whole both
conformed to and exceeded the limits of Marinetti’s agenda, addressing the
newer cultural, esthetic, social, and political concerns and tensions emerging
from the war. The analysis of the key journal contributions and longer works of
this period by Valeria, Rosà, and Robert, and of the details of the debate on
women triggered by Come si seducono le donne, will be part of a separate
study.9 In this article, I will focus on the work of Maria Ginanni, offering an
interpretation of L’Italia futurista’s activities and significance in the war context
that will restore the importance of gender issues, assessing the journal’s seminal
role in providing the impetus for a new wave of Futurism and for a shift in the
role and images of women and the feminine. I will address in particular the
question of how the war influenced gendered articulations of space and time,
and why speed became a key term in Marinetti’s continuing struggle to maintain
leadership.
Contrary to what most scholars have maintained or implied, the very fact of
women’s participation in the journal was neither peripheral nor insignificant. In
fact, L’Italia futurista was the first journal (other than publications tailored
expressly for women) to have such a significant number of female contributors.
The only antecedent was Marinetti’s journal Poesia. Maria Ginanni, who had a
leadership editorial position (she acted as editor in chief for extended periods
when the male editors were at the front, and she founded and edited the series of
books published by the journal, Edizioni dell’Italia Futurista), was one of the
first women to have such a prominent role in Italian publishing.10 As we shall

9
For a brief, useful discussion in French of this debate, see Contarini 204-08. Contarini’s
main concern is to study the image of woman and the feminine in early futurism, but she
focuses mostly on Marinetti.
10
After the journal shut down, Ginanni edited a new series of books, “I libri di valore,”
published by Facchi in Milan through 1919. Cfr. Salaris, Storia del futurismo 100.
Ginanni also collaborated with Corra, Settimelli, and Pio Borani on the biweekly Futurist
journal Lo specchio dell’ora, of which only two issues have been found thus far, both
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 5

see, however, the conflict that divided the contributors of L’Italia futurista was
not only a matter of men against women, but involved a wider redefinition of
gender, and all that gender entailed in terms of subjectivity and the individual’s
role in the worldwide conflict. It was a conflict that cut across biological sexual
difference and involved a whole new generation of Futurists, both women and
men.
The format of L’Italia futurista, whose first issue appeared a year after
Italy’s entrance into the war, was that of a four-page tabloid published every two
weeks (weekly starting with the February 25, 1917 issue, and bi-weekly again
from the August 12, 1917 issue). Its rough, unpolished and “poor” graphic
design resembled that of war bulletins, quite unlike its meticulously designed,
graphically sophisticated and self-consciously creative predecessor, Lacerba.
(Lacerba ceased publications in May 1915, immediately before Italy’s entrance
into the war.) L’Italia futurista was keen to clarify its independence from
Lacerba, with which it is sometimes associated under the misleading rubric of
“Florentine avant-garde.”11 Although L’Italia futurista was published in
Florence, it had little if anything that was specifically Florentine about it. As we
have seen, its collaborators – both men and women – were from all over Italy.
Lacerba’s short-lived adherence to Futurism was judged by the editors in the
inaugural front-page editorial of L’Italia futurista to have been merely
perfunctory and half-hearted. From their point of view, that journal (which in its
last phase was edited entirely by Giovanni Papini), suffered from congenital
passatismo.12 No women had ever published on the pages of Lacerba, and one
of Papini’s principal objections to Marinetti and Futurism was indeed their

from 1918 (May 30th and July 1st). The journal anticipates some of the political themes
taken up by the later Roma futurista. See Mondello 94-97. Ginanni’s contribution to Lo
specchio dell’ora, however, was limited to two brief literary texts: “Camera
rettangolare,” which appeared in the first issue, and “Il doppio dell’infinito,” in the
second.
11
The very notion of a Florentine avant-garde championed by Adamson is in fact
unpersuasive. Most of the Florence-based journals that he studies, especially Il Leonardo
and La voce, while often polemical and anti-Dannunzian, and eager to “purify” the Italian
political scene, were essentially high-brow and hostile (with the partial, temporary
exception of Lacerba in its short futurist phase) to the wild formal experimentation
characteristic of Futurism and most 20th-century avant-garde movements. These journals
were not animated by the interest in mass culture typical of avant-gardes, nor were they
interested in revolutionizing the esthetics of everyday life. They adhered to a set of
largely traditional esthetic and religious values and beliefs typical of the Italian cultural
and social elites, including the belief in the intellectual and spiritual inferiority of women
and of “Southerners.”
12
See the editorial by Settimelli, “L’Italia futurista,” in the first issue, in which he
describes Lacerba has having “un corpo fradicio di passatismo.”
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 6

compromising tendency to open up to women even as they purported to despise

“the feminine.”
During the war, L’Italia futurista functioned at times as an actual bulletin
for the Futurists, publishing, for example, the news of the deaths of Sant’Elia,
Boccioni, and others at the front, and of Russolo’s and Marinetti’s wounding.
Letters and creative contributions from the front, many by unknowns, depicting
the experience and sensations of war, were also featured regularly. The rawness
and violence of real events thus entered the pages of each issue of the journal. It
was an unprecedented compenetration of art and life that seemed truly to fulfill
for the first time the Futurist vision of the avant-garde.
Contributions by Massimo Bontempelli, including the remarkable poem
“Lussuria” written at the front, and Salvatore Quasimodo (a free-word-table in
pure Futurist style) show how far-ranging the appeal of Futurism was at the
time. These canonical writers’ early association with Futurism is often
suppressed or forgotten in literary histories, yet in 1919 Bontempelli published
in Maria Ginanni’s series a whole volume of Futurist poems entitled Il
purosangue, with a cover designed by Ginna. Besides contributing poems,
Bontempelli also sent a letter from the front stating that L’Italia futurista was
the only political journal worth reading (December 9, 1917). Bontempelli was to
become the leader of the neoclassical literary movement known as novecentismo
(and magical realism) in the 1920s and 1930s, while Quasimodo became one of
the key exponents of hermetic poetry. Both movements, in cautious responses to
the fascist regime, eschewed any overt political content and pursued a purely
literary, culturally elitist and self-referential kind of modernism. In light of the
armed conflict, and of the widespread notion that the war could lead to radical
changes in Italy and Europe, the main thrust of L’Italia futurista was, instead,
decidedly political as well as literary and artistic, and reflected the Futurist
utopian idealism of the war years that attracted to the journal an unprecedent and
wide constituency of contributors and readers. The journal was in fact to be an
open forum of esthetic and political confrontation for all who cared to
participate.
The principal and most striking political gesture made by the journal was
indeed that of opening its pages democratically to as wide a range of
contributors and readers as possible. Among the quotes included in the masthead
was Marinetti’s call for the “difesa economica e educazione del proletariato.”
The Futurists, and Marinetti in particular, at the time wished to present
themselves as a radical alternative to the socialists and eventually the
Communists. However, as observed by Umberto Carpi (the critic who has
studied more than anybody else the still little-known yet considerable current of
left-wing and Communist Futurism), Marinetti sought to position futurism not
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 7

“against” or “outside” Socialism and then Communism, but rather “beyond it.”13
The internationalist, reformist and legalitario spirit of the Italian socialist
leaders, who were against the war as well as against women’s suffrage (despite
Anna Kuliscioff’s championing the cause of women), was entirely self-serving,
according to Marinetti and most Futurists, for whom the war represented instead
(as it did for Lenin — alone among the international socialists at the time — in
Russia) a historic opportunity for revolutionary action in and for Italy. L’Italia
futurista and even Marinetti welcomed the news of the Russian revolution in
1917, hoping it would spread through Germany and Europe.14 It was the
Futurists’ enthusiasm for the war as the potential beginning of revolutionary
change, and their patriotic fervor, that around 1914 attracted to the movement
and pulled together the new group of supporters and sympathizers who became
the editors, and both male and female contributors.
Maria Ginanni was the first woman to publish in L’Italia futurista. A poetic
prose piece, “Frammento di novella colorata,” appeared in the first issue, and
other pieces by her continued to appear regularly. She was followed by Fulvia
Giuliani, who contributed a prose poem to the third issue, and Emma Marpillero,
whose visual free-word table, “Silenzio-Alba: parole in libertà,” appeared in the
fourth issue. Only in 1917 did women’s contributions become more explicitly
political, with patriotic propaganda by Ginanni featured prominently several
times,15 and Enrica Piubellini’s visual free-word poem “Campo di Marte”
appearing on May 27, 1917, to Marinetti’s delight. At about the same time,
feminist issues began to surface in the journal, in response to Marinetti’s
provocations in Come si seducono le donne.
A combination of patriotism and the hope that women’s active support of
the war on the home front would legitimate them as citizens and political
subjects had pushed most middle- and upper-class women ― including
feminists ― towards interventionist positions by 1915.16 Many women, like
Sibilla Aleramo, had or soon developed antiwar feelings, yet they reluctantly
kept quiet. Antiwar protest and action, on the other hand, was widespread
among working-class women, who often took the initiative in staging
demonstrations all over Italy.17 By 1917 it became clear that the war had
mobilized women’s intellectual and physical energies as never before. Many
13
Carpi comments on the title of Marinetti’s 1920 pamphlet Al di là del comunismo in his
essay, “Futurismo e sinistra politica.”
14
See Marinetti, Taccuini 66, and Ginna, “Rivoluzione in Germania.”
15
See for example Ginanni’s open letter to Marinetti extolling the Futurist leader’s
courage, published on the front page on May 27, 1917, below the telegram announcing
his wounding.
16
On women’s nationalism and interventismo, see Guidi, who analyzes in particular the
journals L’Unità d’Italia and La madre italiana, and contains a useful critical
bibliography.
17
On working-class and peasant women, see especially Ortaggi.
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 8

middle-class women emerged from the seclusion of the home and the private
sphere for the first time to work in men’s places or to volunteer in support of the
war effort. While this mobilization of women has been recognized and
discussed, the deployment of women’s intellectual energies has received less
attention. It was during the war in fact that many women started writing or took
up various forms of artistic expression as a way of making themselves heard and
visible for the first time. The women of L’Italia futurista were among the most
ardent advocates of the notion that war would represent an accelerated rite of
passage for their sex, and that both Italy and women would emerge stronger
from the conflict.18 As tragic as the war was in many respects, it appeared also to
hold the promise of an accelerated passage for women into the public sphere of
production, politics, literature and the arts, outside the ghettos of the traditional
feminine domains. While Futurism and Marinetti welcomed the new roles of
women to an unprecedented extent in the war period, the spectacular rapidity
with which women in Italy were able to enter the workforce and take over men’s
tasks ironically belied the pre-war Futurist myth of feminine slowness vs.
masculine speed, and the writing of Futurist women challenged some of pre-war
Futurism’s most cherished tenets.
Along with a seemingly unshaken faith in the swift upcoming victory of
Italy, L’Italia futurista propagandized the “classic” Futurist principles of
modernolatria (the cult of modernity, in Boccioni’s felicitous neologism from
the 1914 Pittura e scultura futuriste), plastic dynamism, and words-in-freedom.
Now more than ever, the idea of speed seemed to capture these principles.
During the war, the faster and faster deployment of new technologies and
weapons, the need for new paradigms of accelerated and intensified perception
and cognitive mapping, and the sense that traditional structures of representation
and gender were no longer adequate, made the Futurist notion of speed come
alive and appear all the more relevant to the present moment.19 The accelerated

18
A short assessment of Futurist women during the war may be found in Salaris, “Le
donne futuriste nel periodo tra guerra e dopoguerra.” While some groups of women and
feminists in Italy were initially against the war and favored Italy’s neutrality, the
conflict’s escalation and the increasing pressure to take a stand against Austria and
Germany’s aggression of Belgium and the unprecedented victimization of civilians (the
attack on the Lusitania on May 7th, 1915 where hundreds of women and children died,
made a huge impression in Italy) pushed even women’s groups towards interventionist
positions. Socialist women leaders, including especially Anna Kuliscioff, also came out
in favor of intervention. Nonetheless, antiwar demonstrations and protests were
conducted by working-class women in the country and in industrial cities, most notably
in the Turin insurrection of August 1917.
19
For the perceptual and epistemic changes that ensued from the war, see, among other
works, the studies by Kern, Eksteins, and Virilio. Unfortunately, Kern’s assessment of
futurism is limited and reflects no knowledge of Futurist activities during and after the
war. Eksteins sees Marinetti merely as a fascist writer, and appears to have little or no
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 9

entrance of women into the public sphere seemed at first to be only an aspect of
this radical modernization, one that could still be grasped through the masculine
discourse of speed. Marinetti, in fact, argued in Come si seducono le donne that
women historically had been slower in their development than men, not
qualitatively different or inferior. Now, thanks to war, they were catching up.
But the experience of the women and men of L’Italia futurista shows that things
were not that simple.

Speed as Marinetti’s Wartime Religion vs. Women’s Time and Space

In the first issue of L’Italia futurista, Marinetti’s inaugural manifesto “La nuova
religione-morale della velocità” articulated the fundamental relationship
between war and speed. While the 1909 Founding Manifesto had famously sung
“la bellezza della velocità,” speed is now promoted from an essentially esthetic
principle to a global and all-powerful religion imbued with morale-boosting
optimism. In a comic, exhilarated tone reminiscent of the new Futurist synthetic
performance style, Marinetti sings the praises of the technological discoveries
and innovations — from new kinds of fuel to new means of transportation and
communication ― which were leading to a seemingly unstoppable acceleration
and globalization of human existence. World War One, as scholars have since
recognized, coincided in fact with the first collective experience of
globalization. Rapid communication made space itself contract and condense;
the entire earth and even the universe appeared within immediate reach,
mapped, controlled, under surveillance, and seizable by the strongest and most
willful. (The direct connection between the aggressive warfare mentality of
World War One and colonial violence in Africa has been recently the object of
renewed attention by historians.) The seeming instantaneousness of worldwide
communication by wireless telegraphy and radio transmission (with radical
improvements in the years of the war), the technological innovations frantically
fuelled by war itself ― the warplane, the submarine, the new kinds of German
U-boats, the so-called MAS, or “Motobarca Armata SVAN” (the fast Italian
torpedo boats and gunboats developed from around 1915 by the Società
Veneziana Automobili Navali), the machine-gun, the bombs — and, especially,
the accelerated rhythm of destruction and mass production of armaments that
characterized the first modern war, contributed to bolster the myth of speed as

sense of futurism’s pre-fascist and wider cultural context and constituency. Virilio’s more
profound philosophical perspective, on the other hand, is thoroughly apocalyptic and
does little justice to the more inventive and creative, if utopian, aspects of the avant-
garde. Kwinter in Architectures of Time offers a suggestive but historically and culturally
uninformed interpretation of Boccioni’s and Sant’Elia’s notions of simultaneity, speed,
and of the space-time continuum, in terms of the development of Einsteinian relativity.
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 10

the quintessence of modernity,20 and the ultimate weapon of contemporary man

and “masculine” nations. In Marinetti’s vision, speed is the synthesis of all
forces and all movements. Speed alone is pure, while slowness is immonda —
impure. People who stand still, enveloped by sleep and silence, are a source of
disgust (Teoria 33). Slowness is associated with passivity, pacifism,
underdevelopment, inert primitiveness and a rancid romanticism (Teoria 132).
In the modern world, according to Marinetti, speed replaces God, and the cult of
speed takes the place of traditional religion.21
One of the implicit goals of Marinetti’s strategy in this manifesto that has
escaped most critics’ attention (or has been suppressed because hardly
reconcilable with the dominant vision of Marinetti’s proto-fascism), is that of
overcoming the Christian and Catholic rhetoric of patriotism. For propagandists
at the time such as Father Agostino Gemelli, who studied the psychology of the
trenches and was a close associate of General Cadorna, religion helped the
Italian cause by making the masses of illiterate soldiers obedient, passive
victims and sacrificial lambs willing to go to their deaths for the nation’s
salvation. Mass was a regular part of the soldiers’ routine at the front, and priests
were present not only to perform their religious functions but also as soldiers in
uniform involved in the actual fighting. Women were widely encouraged by
wartime propaganda to identify with the Madonna as Mater Dolorosa, accepting
the sacrifice of their men as comparable to that of Christ. Even Gabriele
d’Annunzio, in his wartime poems, turned to the religious rhetoric of sacrifice,
martyrdom, and prayer. Cultural historians such as Emilio Gentile have shown
how fascism appropriated this kind of religious rhetoric to create its own
mystique while forging its enduring alliance with the Catholic church. Marinetti
despised this retrograde approach and saw instead in the conflict the opportunity
to move swiftly toward a social and mental revolution. Thus, instead of the old
rituals and symbols, Marinetti’s new secular and rather comical and ironic
religion proposes to worship devices that allow human perception to be
accelerated and remap space and time rather than transcend them. The point is
not so much to create a new mystique, however, as to debunk the old one,
inverting at the same time the tragic and sacrificial meaning of war violence and

20
See in particular the work of Virilio, especially Speed and Politics (first published in
1977). For Virilio, the speed of the military-industrial complex is the driving force of
cultural and social development, and history progresses at the speed of its weapons
systems.
21
Schnapp (“Perché una religione-morale della velocità?”) offers an interesting
appreciation of Marinetti’s new religion as a reworking of ancient, even eternal religious
and mythic yearnings of humanity, connected to the seemingly demonic, thrilling power
and exhilaration of accelerated movement of the body, and especially to the swiftness of
an unreflective “racing mind.” The claim that Marinetti’s manifesto is not prevalently
bellicose, however, is unpersuasive, especially if the manifesto is read in the specific
context of the journal in which it appeared.
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 11

turning it into its comic opposite. The telegraph, the telephone, the movie-
camera, the car become sacred. Equally sacred, according to the manifesto, even
divine, are cannons and projectiles, hand grenades (as in Monty Python’s satire,
“holy” hand grenades), deep mines and fast countermines that allow soldiers to
blow the enemy up before being blown up: “I campi di battaglia. Le
mitragliatrici, i fucili, i cannoni, i proiettili sono divini. Le mine e contromine
veloci: far saltare il nemico PRIMA che il nemico ci faccia saltare” (Marinetti,
Teoria 133). Speed and violence are in fact inseparable. Speed is associated with
the intense, nerve-wracking noise of artillery and cannons, the explosions of
engines, the battlefield. Speed becomes the emblem of the courage,
decisiveness, promptness, and prowess that the soldier needs in war and that
makes man truly modern and able to revolutionize life on earth, rather than
transcend it in a spiritual quest (in Come si seducono le donne, even the sexual
and erotic advantages of speed are comically exalted). Einstein’s new theory of
relativity is quickly seized by Marinetti as convenient ammunition for his
argument: the values of time and space are made “soggettivi” by speed, he
claims, and hence enslaved to the power of man (Teoria 135). Finally, although
Marinetti does not elaborate on this point, it is the blinding adrenaline, the jolt
and the jerk generated by an unthinking, unreflective, mechanical and
instantaneous mind-body connection that allows a soldier to shoot and kill
another man, and to expose his own fragile body to immediate destruction.
Marinetti sought entirely to suppress the opposite, all-too-real experience of
war: that of agonizing slowness, of waiting, of contemplation, of fear, of a time
that never passed and a space that could never be really or fully covered or
recovered, which characterized the life of the powerless soldier in the trenches
as he faced the enemy across the no-man’s land. Such an experience, which
Marinetti himself lived through (as his diaries show), was as emblematic of the
First World War as the opposite one of dizzying acceleration and noise. The
irony of war resided, in fact, to a large extent in this unnerving opposition. It
was a devastating, corrosive irony, one that for many precipitated a crisis of
consciousness and identity that, in spite of Marinetti’s wish to impose his
uplifting earthly religion of speed, found its ways onto the pages of L’Italia
futurista.22
Equally paradoxical and ironic was, from a specifically female perspective,
the opportunity for “slow thinking,” for reflection, contemplation, introspection,
and intellectual questioning that the war — despite the dramatic acceleration of
global events ― brought for some women as they waited for the men to return.
The war allowed for a new, different articulation of time for women. On the one
hand, the war quickly precipitated changes whereby women were freed from

22
The classic work on irony and World War One is by Fussell. Marinetti’s work,
however, hardly fits with Fussell’s notion of wartime irony as the inversion of all pre-war
ideals.
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 12

what Julia Kristeva has called “women’s time” (essentially time marked by the
seasonal and eternal cycles of nature, gestation and nurturing in the home and
the private sphere) and propelled them into more traditionally masculine
temporal frameworks and rhythms of industrial production, business, public
transportation, communication and publishing. This experience caused in turn
some radical changes even among intellectual women. Opposed to women’s
work before the war, the popular journalist and novelist Cordelia (Virginia
Treves) published in 1916 Le donne che lavorano, a carefully reasoned and
documented pamphlet supporting the idea of women working outside of the
home, partly on the basis of the evidence of women’s work done to replace men
during the war. The pamphlet, which advocates the admission of women at all
professional levels, culminates in a clear, even-handed demonstration of the
immediate need for women’s suffrage.
One of the most momentous phenomena of war for peasant and working-
class women in Italy was certainly their sudden, massive insertion into the
workforce of the military industry, for by the end of 1916 70% of industrial
workers were women. The rhythm of production required working at night as
well as during the day, with shifts that were a minimum of twelve hours. Many
middle-class women too went to work and became the breadwinners, often
assuming all the responsibilities and burdens of running as well as supporting a
family. In addition, and in ironic contrast, to this regimented, controlled
“masculine” temporality, women came to experience the waiting, the unfamiliar
vacuousness of unstructured time that the absence of men and even the
hardships of war generated ― waiting in endless lines for ration cards, bread,
documents, and waiting for their men and children to return, as described most
poignantly in Grazia Deledda’s 1919 visionary short story “Il ritorno del figlio,”
and in Ada Negri’s 1917 “Mater admirabilis,” one of the stories about women
alone in her collection Le solitarie.23 Without their men demanding daily
attention and care at home, some middle-class women especially had time to
think, to read, to write, time to be and work with other women. They set up care
and support networks, such as the child-care centers for the children of soldiers
started in Milan by Sofia Bisi Albini and staffed with female volunteers.
Working-class women — as indicated vividly, for example, by Teresa Noce in
her autobiography Gioventù senza sole — during the war were often exposed for
the first time to the world of reading, writing, and politics. Noce herself went on
to become a writer and a Communist leader. Both middle- and upper-class
women became involved in hospital work, nursing, and veteran-support groups.
The experience of tending to the slow recovery of the wounded or mentally
incapacitated, waiting for other men from the front, writing to them and waiting

23
The book was attacked by Marinetti in an open letter entitled “Donne, non
piagnucolate,” published on the front page of the November 4, 1917 issue of L’Italia
futurista, shortly after the disastrous defeat at Caporetto.
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 13

for their responses, is described in literature by women –– hardly remembered

today — such as Anna Vertua Gentile’s 1919 novel La najade della cascata. All
women wrote letters to the front, usually to their relatives. Maria Ginanni, for
example, had three brothers at the front in 1917, including one who was barely
eighteen. But letters to total unknowns at the front were also written by many
women, who thus had the opportunity to reflect on their lives and those of
others. The more affluent bourgeois and upper-class women who became
volunteer nurses working with the wounded and shell-shocked were able during
long hours of vigil to reflect on the horrors of that bloodshed. A collection of
letters by soldiers from all over Italy — many of them hardly literate ― to their
nurses, Lettere di soldati alle loro infermiere, was published in May 1918 with a
preface by Ada Negri. Many were in response to the nurses’ own letters,
unfortunately not included in the volume. They all testify to the immense level
of suffering brought about not only by physical injuries, but especially by the
dislocation and tearing apart of families, and the difficulty for veterans to heal
and regain a sense of belonging. As stated by Negri in her sober and subdued
preface, “ognuna di queste lettere rappresenta una ferita.”
The most extraordinary part of the book, however, is visual. Thirteen
delicate pencil portraits done by Pierina Levi — one of Balla’s most dedicated
students — accompany the letters. It was Levi herself, apparently, who
amorously collected the letters and edited the volume, which was, however,
published anonymously.24 Although these intimate bedside portraits done by
Levi in military hospitals over three years from 1915 to 1918 are
psychologically detailed and reflect the individuality of each man (they are even
accompanied by affectionate nicknames, written in pencil along with the date of
each drawing), they share a striking visual quality: all the men have sweet,
pensive smiles on their faces, and their features and attitudes are softened in a
way that makes them uniformly look not at all manly and warlike, or heroically
stoic, but rather touchingly effeminate and dreamy.

24
This is reported by Elica Balla, 1: 425. Levi told her as much when she gave the book
to her father. See also Matitti 94.
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 14

Pencil drawings by Pierina Levi 25

These portraits convey the artist’s profound reflection on the irony of war, and
are hardly reconcilable with the macho rhetoric of wartime propaganda,
including Marinetti’s, which presented war as the apogee of virility.26 Sitting at
the bedside of these soldiers, Levi had time to elaborate and express her own
deeply subversive take on the war itself.27 Folded within the acceleration of time
brought by war was thus another sense of time that could feel infinitely slow and
allow for unprecedented reflection and exploration.
Space was similarly reconfigured. Women were confronted with a no-man’s
land in a different way. It was the removal and absence of men from the home
and even from the streets and squares during the war that led women to resituate
themselves and rethink their relationship not only within the domestic space, but
with the entire social and even natural and physical space.28 As we have seen,

25
The drawings, signed “P. Levi,” are reproduced here from Lettere di soldati 82, 92.
26
In the same open letter to Ada Negri published in the issue dated November 4, 1917,
presumably reacting to an earlier collection of such letters prefaced or edited by her,
Marinetti deplores the mournful and depressing tone taken by women in writing to men at
the front, claiming that men are disgusted by such feminine manifestations and adding
humorously that the only feminine features of “this chaste and heroic front are the curvy
and insidious trajectories of the grenades.”
27
Little is known about the life of Pierina Levi, though Matitti hypothesizes that she was
related to the art critic Primo Levi, an admirer of Balla. She had shown her work,
including both paintings and drawings, in several collective youth exhibits between 1907
and 1913, and then together with Annie Nathan in their own studio exhibition in Rome in
April 1914.
28
This can be seen in a wide variety of works by women even from backgrounds other
than the avant-garde. Especially interesting in this regard are the novel Mors tua vita mea
by Matilde Serao and the poems about the war by Ada Negri. For a now classic
assessment of the paradoxically positive effects of war on women in England, see Gilbert
and Gubar. In the chapter entitled “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 15

women’s new visibility in non-domestic spaces and contexts was striking and
made all the more powerful in the national imagination by the proliferation in
the popular press of images of women in their new, war-related environments
and attires. While this spectacle could be superficially sensational, it also
marked a fundamental moment of disjunction in the history of gender roles that
required to be thought through and analyzed. Many texts by the women of
L’Italia futurista ― for example, Ginanni’s Il poema dello spazio and even
some of the texts by men ― reflect this more pensive, analytical frame of mind,
and seek to rethink time and space in light of the war experience. But while the
male-authored texts tend to be dark, subdued and at times even nihilistic, the
female-authored ones express a sense of unprecedented fulfillment, almost of
joy as they move towards directions and dimensions — contemplation,
introspection, expansion ― previously unexplored by women, because
colonized by men.29

Maria Ginanni and a Futurist Woman’s Rethinking of Time and Space

It is in Maria Ginanni’s work that an ironic reversal of the Marinettian obsession
with matter, speed, technology, the metallized body and the conquest of global
space is most evident. In contrast to Marinetti’s preference for monumental,
allegorical narrative (best exemplified by Mafarka and later Gli indomabili),
Ginanni’s chosen form is the prose poem, or the poetic fragment. Her prose
poems were subsequently spliced together through a process of montage and
published as the volumes Montagne trasparenti (1917) and Il poema dello
spazio (1919). Ginanni generally eschews narrative altogether, though
sometimes her writing takes the form of a reflection on a brief anecdote or a
simple event. More often, her lyrical but carefully measured, controlled writing
(always in the first person) focuses on the perception of something apparently
banal and insignificant (crickets, fireflies, the sound of bells, a cheap souvenir, a
handkerchief, fog). The first segment of the prose poem “La piazza del tempo”
(also collected in Montagne trasparenti 19-25) for example, is based on the
experience, one night in a hotel room, of hearing crickets sing outside, while
next door an invisible man, heavy with food, rolls over in his sleep, snoring. The

the Great War” (258-323), Gilbert argues that World War One liberated women on
several fronts, changing economic expectations, welcoming them into the workforce, and
creating new social and aesthetic aspirations. No similar study exists for Italian culture
and literature yet.
29
In a 1916 word-in-freedom poem entitled “Velocità,” dedicated to “Giacomo Balla
velocissimo,” Magamal fashions the interesting image of an “inner speed,” a personal
speed of the female mind that, ironically, can accelerate perception but also, inversely,
slow everything down, expanding the space of mental experience into “un lungo fiume –
calmo e maestoso.”
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 16

sound of the crickets makes the imagination soar, and the listener feels herself
projected outside, away from the heavy, dense materiality of the body and of the
earth itself, into a lighter, infinitely larger dimension. In a reversal of the
traditional association of materiality with the body of woman, however, here it is
a man’s body that stands for the inertness of matter. The neutral space of the
hotel room, removed from the domestic space that is woman’s customary
habitat, functions as a temporary “room of her own,” and facilitates the flight of
her imagination and her own original rethinking of the relationship between time
and space. However, she does not escape into either a spiritual dimension or a
mystical trance. Nor does she limit herself to the sphere of the small and the
detail — the traditional scale of the feminine.30 The body is not so much denied
as opened up, made light and porous. Neither solid nor fluid, the woman who
speaks feels herself miraculously transformed and then temporarily crystallized
into an expanded cosmic body, similar to a nebula. The fantastic metamorphosis
in “La piazza del tempo,” which in some ways anticipates the inventions of Italo
Calvino’s Cosmicomics and even his reflections on “Lightness” in Memos for
the Next Millennium, is narrated in the form of a conversation with the crickets,
in which scientific terms from physics such as “legge di attrazione universale,”
“sbilancio moleculare,” and “nebula,” are used in conjunction with delicate
lyrical lines whose rhythm is defined by subtle assonances and synesthesia:
“Grilli: seghe esilissime da traforo che sfaccettano il nero enorme cristallo
profumo della notte” (Montagne trasparenti 23). The stylistic effect of
Ginanni’s many lyrical lines is like an intricate and exquisite embroidery, a
fantastic work of arabesque and tiny detail expanded to cosmic dimensions.
Ginanni’s lyricism, however, is always tempered by irony, and by the use of
prosaic terms and expressions. The crickets’ song, for example, is only “segatura
musicale.” And the poet thanks the crickets for saving the world “almeno per
dieci minuti” (ibid.).
Poetic irony, however, is not Ginanni’s only achievement. Ginanni
interrogates the notion of “space,” the infinitely small, the apparently banal and
everyday that futurism and especially Marinetti (with his obsession for the
oversized and gigantic) previously regarded as insignificant, feminine and
romantic, and she connects it with other, wider, deeper and more ambitious
dimensions of experience and scientific knowledge.31 These include the new,

30
For the association in traditional 18th- and 19th-century esthetics of detail with the
feminine, see Schor.
31
In comparing her first and second book in the introduction to Il poema dello spazio, she
observes: “Nel primo volume: sensazioni liriche su impressioni di natura e di elementi
interiori cristallizzate in lucide conquiste cerebrali. In questo: rarefazioni e tremiti che
pervadono con equilibri ed intuizioni campi d’incertezza e di incoscienza: l’ignoto
spirituale e universale. Un elemento di questo volume dato da me sola fino ad oggi:
queste incerte profondità spirituali trasportate in un campo scientifico, scoperte nella
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 17

expanded sense of space-time, the new enthusiasms, uncertainties and fears

generated by the discoveries of atomic and gravitational physics, in conjunction
with the realm of the spiritual, the unconscious and the metaphysical that earlier
Futurism dismissed or denounced. Trained in mathematics like Bergson (a
thinker whose work is well known to have influenced the Futurists, especially
Boccioni), Ginanni shared the French philosopher’s keen interest in the
developments of modern physics, and (whether or not she read Bergson’s Essais
sur les données immédiates de la conscience or Matière et mémoire) she saw
time as a part of the substance of matter itself and of experience. The internal
multiplicity and duration of subjective experience, divorced from traditional,
measurable time-space, is a theme that runs through all of Ginanni’s work, along
with the pervasive sense of the complicity of mind and matter. For Ginanni, in
fact, matter is a multiplicity of images and physical perceptions, vibrations in
and of the brain, rather than what lies behind images.32
The search for a new definition of the spiritual and the metaphysical,
unencumbered by either traditional religious concerns or by the misogynistic
rhetoric of the flesh-despisers, and attuned to the discoveries of the new physics’
incorporation of time deeply into space, is what these small prose texts are
ultimately about. The second segment of “La piazza del tempo” points to the
tragic nature of religious and eschatological expectations about temporality. No
redemption through sacrificial immolation is possible, Ginanni states
unequivocally, with a sudden, veiled but unmistakable allusion to the religious
rhetoric used by Cadorna and others to justify the colossal sacrifice of the war.
(Significantly, the prose poem is dedicated to Boccioni, whose death had just
been announced.) Yet Ginanni is unafraid to state here and through Montagne
trasparenti that hers is a spiritual search (however eclectic and non-traditional),
that in her experience of imaginary expansion, ascension and transformation
(prompted by the crickets’ music), she is looking for a possible revelation, an
opening, a moment of “absolute truth.” For this particular aspect of her writing,
she has been compared to Eugenio Montale (Papini 351). Other comparisons
may come to mind with, for example, the poetic experiments of Giovanni
Pascoli, the Futurist Palazzeschi, and some of the crepuscolari. Yet Ginanni
does not fit any particular mold. Her writing is original, fresh, surprising. She
has Pascoli’s reverence for small things and for the naïve, child-like enchanted
gaze, but not his fear of sexuality and his moralism. She shares the ironic
attitude of a poet like Sergio Corazzini, but has none of his complacency and
false modesty. Her writing often approaches a level of surreal pictorial

zona-ignota-anima identiche e parallele a quella della zona-concreta-fisica; equilibri

intuiti, trasformati in legge ed analizzati sul tavolo sperimentale della vita spirito” (8).
32
Bergson writes: “Le vibrations cérébrales font partie du monde matériel” (3). For a
feminist take on this theme in Bergson, see Grosz, especially chapters 6 and 11.
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 18

abstraction and hallucinatory fantasy that is quite foreign to the Italian literary
tradition, and has prompted comparison with the style of “spiritual” abstract
painting by Kandinski and Ginna (Viazzi 368). “Paesaggio interno” (Montagne
trasparenti 36-37), for example, is made up entirely of a series of color
notations, where each sentence takes on a role similar to that of a brush stroke,
or the contours of a surreal design. Any comparison to the fragmentary,
automatic writings of a medium, devoid of any logic or connectedness, is,
however, misleading (Salaris, Le futuriste 56).33 In Ginanni’s work there is,
rather, a tightly controlled use of language to approximate, through words and
images, and especially through assonances, synesthesia, repetition, and
paranomasia, an effect similar to that of painterly and musical biomorphic
abstraction. The colors and shapes evoked (tiny green circles, silver and gold
threads, long purple cones) are associated with natural forms, however
decontextualized and surreal. For example, the tiny green circles are like “iridi
di uccelli fantastici” perforating “la monotonia del cielo.” In “Campane”
(Montagne trasparenti 49-56), the sound vibrations from a bell merge with the
echoes of human steps. The purpose of this soft verbal abstraction is, on the one
hand, simply esthetic (it leads the reader to the enjoyment of form for its own
sake), and, on the other hand, it points to an “inner landscape” of the brain,
where physical sensations flow and metamorphose through free association.
Despite the consistent choice of what is small scale in terms of both form
and subject, Ginanni does not in the least perceive her writing as minor or
secondary. On the contrary, she refers often to what she calls, unabashedly, her
“genius,” and the lucid power of her mind.34 What she means by the power of
her mind, however, is quite different from what Marinetti and other earlier
Marinettian Futurists usually understood by these terms. For Marinetti, part of
whose Mafarka il futurista was republished in L’Italia futurista on the very
same pages as Ginanni’s texts, the power of the mind is first and foremost the
power to make the body infinitely stronger, a perfect instrument of power and
domination. It is the power to forge the body like a machine. For Ginanni, it is
exactly the opposite. In the “nocturnal” fragment entitled “Variazioni” (part of

33
Like many of the members of European avant-garde movements, including most of the
men and women of L’Italia futurista, Ginanni was interested in the occult and even
before joining the Futurist movement she attended the meetings of the Theosophical
Society in Rome and Annie Besant’s lectures, reading the work of Rudolf Steiner and
Madame Blavatsky. However, the fascination for the occult and theosophy was so
widespread among Italian writers and intellectuals at the time (Giovanni Amendola, for
example, was an ardent follower), that it cannot in any meaningful way “explain”
Ginanni’s writing style and the way in which she crafted her collages of prose poems.
For a reading that focuses on the role of the occult in all of Futurism, see Cigliana.
34
See the segment entitled “Variazioni” in “Le lucciole”; also in Montagne trasparenti:
“Le dita più esili della mia anima vogliono sorreggere i vostri fili impalpabili ed
intrecciarli con la delicatezza più tenue e l’acume più lucido del mio genio” (72).
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 19

the sequence “La lucciole,” also collected in Montagne trasparenti), the body
(which in “La piazza del tempo” was opened up and nebulized) is essentially
suspended, momentarily bracketed, except for the brain, which engages in an
exercise of self-induced emptying-out, turning the mind into a blank space.
In the prose piece entitled “Solitudini spirituali” (December 9, 1917), later
included as the first chapter of the volume Il poema dello spazio, the setting is
one of absolute solitude. The theme of solitude and of the solitary room that
allows for reflection, runs throughout the book. This solitude is conducive to
self-analysis, the auscultation and probing of her own interior time-space,
outside any preconceived analytical framework or goal. This is in itself a daring
gesture for a woman, considering that women before the war were commonly
supposed to have no interiority, no depth, and no right to bare their soul in
public, as Emilio Cecchi had spitefully asserted in his 1911 article published in
La Voce, “La donna che si spoglia” (June 22, 1911). Thus Ginanni implicitly
refutes the misogynous cultural assumptions at the heart of the influential
intellectual circles of both La voce and Lacerba (both leaders of the
interventionist campaign that pushed Italy into the war). The same assumptions
— it should be pointed out — still permeated the thinking of a large part of
L’Italia futurista’s own constituency of authors and readers.
The rhythm of Ginanni’s self-analysis, of which we are given distinct
moments throughout Il poema dello spazio, is one of extreme slowness, almost
of slow motion “attimo per attimo.” There is no trace of violence in the text. The
author’s attention lingers slowly at the margins of perception: for example, the
shadows projected by furniture on a wall, or the small wisps of dust that
accumulate “nella nostra assenza” (Poema 17). Objects become estranged,
reconfigured in unfamiliar ways through this peripheral perceptual exploration,
and perception itself becomes de-centered, multiple, and labyrinthine. Ginanni
searches for an alternative kind of vision, one that does not obey the scopophilic
drive to fix and instantaneously master the object. She uses the adjective azzurro
several times to connote the uncertain, unfocussed, soft and almost
phosphorescent, yet revelatory light of this different kind of looking: “Si respira
in una zona totalmente azzurra, totalmente nostra: vedere vedere quello che
nessun altro può vedere” (23). This sense of self-discovery and transparency
connoted by the color blue contrasts strikingly with Mallarmé’s jaded azur,
where the color of the sky is but an ironic, haunting reminder of the poet’s
impotent sterility, his sense of belatedness, emptiness, and exhaustion (Collected
Poems 19-20). Deliberate yet open-ended and fluid, Ginanni’s way of looking
both outside and inside herself ― through a kind of inner eye ― allows her to
discover an interiority and an anteriority, a duration whose depths are seemingly
without end.
The inner vision discloses the space of the unconscious. Personal memories
and dreams are part of this inner landscape, yet Ginanni deliberately brackets
any previous psychological, psychoanalytic, philosophical, or theological, and
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 20

even literary knowledge. Like Socrates, she looks inside herself for truth, but in
the process erases Socrates (and Plato), putting them and the entire male
metaphysical tradition of Western thought out of her sight. Like Descartes,
Ginanni with her “cervello analitico” (Poema 41) doubts everything, even
sensory perception; she reinvents Descartes’s methodical doubt from a female
point of view, but in the process she deliberately forgets about Descartes, too.
“Mi sento così bambina, così ingenua,” she says ironically (33). One of the
ongoing themes of Il poema dello spazio and of Montagne trasparenti is an
implicit, yet pointed polemic against the will to power (and the Nietzschean
superman revived by Marinetti in the pages of Mafarka). Her self-analysis and
radical questioning have taught her that one needs to “farsi di questa incertezza
infinita l’unico atomo di certezza” (Poema 53). Yet her perspective is not purely
individualistic and subjective. Each of her chapters is in fact dedicated to a
woman, “tenderly.” “Assorbimenti,” one of the last fragments, is dedicated
“Alla geniale Rosa Rosà, teneramente” (99).
Other women like Ginanni had a sense that they had to erase from their
minds the assumptions of pre-war ways of thinking and start from zero. Pre-war
thinking (and writing) were essentially male: that way of thinking placed women
– passive and inert ― on the side of unthinking materiality. Alternatively, it
made them into symbols of a pure, equally un-intellectual spirituality. Many
Futurist women of the war generation rejected this male-dominated thought, but
they also, in true Futurist spirit, launched an attack against the outdated gender
stereotypes of Marinettian Futurism. In their view, not only was Futurist
misogyny obsolete and dead even as a metaphor, but Marinetti’s own wartime
vision of woman as the epitome of corporeality and the intelligence “of the
body” needed debunking too. As befitted the spirit of Futurism, these younger
Futurist women set out to do just that, although theirs was a subtle war of
position, not an openly confrontational war of maneuver.
Marinetti’s strategy to cope with this second front at home was, as always,
shrewdly seductive: he sought to attract women back to him and to what he
insisted on portraying as the erotic thrill of war. In a letter sent to Maria Ginanni
from the front, and published in L’Italia futurista on March 6, 1917, he wrote
that he had read Montagne trasparenti underground, in a trench, while waiting
for the order to open fire on the enemy, and while above his head a spectacular,
pyrotechnic duel of artillery fire was taking place: “[…] siete l’unica donna
degna e capace di vivere in questa atmosfera violentissima!” he concluded,
reminding her of how excited — like a little girl ― she had been once by the
spectacle they had witnessed together of shrapnel exploding on the water near
Viareggio. The same issue of L’Italia futurista contained a whole page of brief
reviews and comments on Montagne trasparenti, including Marinetti’s
hyperbolic statement, “Credo fermamente che Maria Ginanni sia il più
formidabile genio femminile che abbia l’Italia […].” Nonetheless, Ginanni’s
book must have felt like a betrayal to him, the spectral resuscitation of ghosts
 M. Ginanni vs. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy 21

from the past. The very color azzurro was not only an allusion to the occult in
Marinetti’s eyes, but surely evoked the specter of Mallarmé, chastised in “Noi
rinneghiamo i nostri maestri simbolisti” for having looked to the “sorgente
azzurra del passato,” toward “le ciel antérieur où fleurit la beauté” (Marinetti,
Teoria 302). In contrast to the color that, in his eyes at least, resembles
excessively Mallarmé’s azur, Marinetti wants to take Ginanni and the others
back to the power of Futurist red, because, as stated in the same manifesto, “Noi
siamo rossi e amiamo il rosso.” Red to Marinetti was the color of fire, of heroic,
explosive action and of the power of speed and of the machine.

University of California, Los Angeles

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