‘We will glorify war – and scorn for women’: Marinetti, the futurist Mussolini sidekick who outdid Elon Musk

He was the brilliant yet alarming writer of the Futurist Manifesto, a bohemian poet jailed with Mussolini who helped forge the modern world. As a new show re-examines his troubling legacy, we explore the Italian troublemaker’s extraordinary life

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the Elon Musk of the early 20th century, combining a joy in technological innovation with an appetite for illiberal politics. Where Musk builds rockets, Marinetti celebrated those shiny new inventions, the aeroplane and the motor car. The Futurist Manifesto, which he wrote when the movement existed only in his head, begins with a rhapsodic account of a fast drive that ends in a crash, which delights him more than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the famous Greek sculpture in the Louvre. Machines, he believes, make all previous art irrelevant. Futurism will hymn the hard new beauty.

Marinetti’s role in the making of the modern world is insufficiently recognised, presumably because he was so contentious and offensive to mainstream democratic values. Futurism is celebrated for the artists and architects it inspired, rather than its manifesto-issuing, speech-making, rabble-rousing leader. But an exhibition opening this month at London’s Estorick Collection draws attention to Marinetti’s own creative contribution to futurism. Entitled Breaking Lines, it centres on what Marinetti called “words in freedom”, the formless, collage-like experimental poetry he invented in his 1912-13 sound and concrete poem Zang Tumb Tuuum.