Maria Ginanni vs. F. T. Marinetti: women, speed, and war in futurist Italy.

Re, Lucia

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

Even 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 Rosa 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 Rosa 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 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 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 Rosa (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 Khun 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 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. Rosa was a painter, book illustrator, poet and novelist. Women's writing and art work, especially by Ginanni, Rosa and Robert, were often prominently displayed on the front page of L'Italia futurista. Rosa'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, Rosa, 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 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 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 "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 Kuliscioffs 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 liberta," 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 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 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 velocita" articulated the fundamental relationship between war and speed. While the 1909 Founding Manifesto had famously sung "la bellezza della velocita," 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 Societa 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 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 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 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 Gioventu 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 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 Pencil drawings by Pierina Levi (25) 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.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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, 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 (1918) 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 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, 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 donnees immediates de la conscience or Matiere et memoire) 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 naive, 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 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 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 puo vedere" (23). This sense of self-discovery and transparency connoted by the color blue contrasts strikingly with Mallarme'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 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 cosi bambina, cosi 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 Rosa, 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 piu formidabile genio femminile che abbia l'Italia [...]." Nonetheless, Ginanni's book must have felt like a betrayal to him, the spectral resuscitation of ghosts 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 Mallarme, chastised in "Noi rinneghiamo i nostri maestri simbolisti" for having looked to the "sorgente azzurra del passato," toward "le ciel anterieur ou fleurit la beaute" (Marinetti, Teoria 302). In contrast to the color that, in his eyes at least, resembles excessively Mallarme'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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(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 novita 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).

(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.

(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.

(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

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."

(13) Carpi comments on the title of Marinetti's 1920 pamphlet Al di la 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'Unita d'Italia and La madre italiana, and contains a useful critical bibliography.

(17) On working-class and peasant women, see especially Ortaggi.

(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

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.

(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 ("Perche una religione-morale della velocita?") 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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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 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 "Velocita," 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."

(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 profondita spirituali trasportate in un campo scientifico, scoperte nella 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 cerebrales font partie du monde materiel" (3). For a feminist take on this theme in Bergson, see Grosz, especially chapters 6 and 11.

(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 piu esili della mia anima vogliono sorreggere i vostri fili impalpabili ed intrecciarli con la delicatezza piu tenue e l'acume piu lucido del mio genio" (72).