Filippo Tommaso Marinetti liked automobiles, particularly his four-cylinder Fiat sports car. For him, the car represented innovation and vitality, even violence. Most of all, it signified the future. An Italian poet, performer, and pamphleteer, Marinetti was a reactionary; he loathed egalitarianism and democracy. He also wasn’t a conservative in any traditional sense, for there was little that he, and others in the Futurist art movement that he founded, wished to conserve. In his 1909 treatise, Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, he wrote, “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind.” A precursor to the fascism that would envelop Europe, Marinetti was an influence on Benito Mussolini, and that ideology, which would soon fulfill that dark promise of destroying Europe’s museums, libraries, and academies.
