Among the artworks, a machine. An Italian machine. At the center of the last room of the "Time of Futurism" exhibition, opened at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (GNAM) in Rome in December 2024, stands, among the canvases of early 20th-century Italian avant-garde painters, a striking red seaplane. It is a scale replica of the Macchi-Castoldi M.C.72, which allowed Italian test pilot Francesco Agello to set the world speed record in 1934, reaching 711 km/h.
Italian futurism was born 25 years before this feat, in 1909, on the pages of Le Figaro: that year, poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) published the manifesto of the futurist movement in the French newspaper. "We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness," he proclaimed. It is this movement that the Rome exhibition, one of the major cultural projects of the Italian far right, pays tribute to.
Due to the fascist aspect of its heritage, futurism has long been viewed with suspicion, though not entirely rejected, within republican Italy. The government dominated by Giorgia Meloni's far-right party aims to rehabilitate it as part of its cultural policy: It wants to integrate figures and movements into the national narrative that it believes have been ignored for too long.
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