ARTURO COLOMBO

Marinetti e il '98 (con il testo di «Les Emeutes milanaises de mai 1898»

N. 184

Summary - Long before Filippo Tommaso Marinetti came to sympathise with futurism, he published an original report in the Revue Blanche (15 August - only a few days away from the assassination of King Umberto I), on the subject of the "Milan commotion of May 1898", of which he had been a direct witness. The article, which is here reproduced in its original French form, at once gives an idea - as indeed does the introductory note - of the descriptive liveliness and originality of style of the young Marinetti (who was not even twenty at the time of the cannonades of Bava Beccaris). This style is exemplified in the first part of the article, in which he provides a vivid synopsis of the events involving the popular, anti-government movement, that took place more or less all over Italy during the first months of that year, as well as in the second part of the article, which tells the dramatic story of those days in Milan, with theis workers' strikes, riots, clashes between demonstrators and the forces of order, and deaths and injuries in the streets - events which were destined to end not only in a great deal of grief, of arrests and sentences, but also in a general upsetting of the normal habits of the Lombardy capital, in its transformation from a "Germanic city" (to use Marinetti's singular definition) into an unrecognizable metropolis, with a "frenetic", or even disturbing face. In the final part of Marinetti's story, we also come across a number of important personalities, such as the leader Filippo Turati, who is described as being a "powerful spirit", though also a little "buddist", which is to say indolent. Another such personality is Anna Kuliscioff, who is considered "fragile and sickly" but as a politician is nevertheless "the soul of Milanese socialism".