Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

b 1876 , Alexandria—died 1944 , Bellagio (I).
b in 1876 in Alexandria, Egypt as Emilio Angelo Carlo Marinetti (later called Filippo Tommaso)—died 1944; he became an Italian millionaire poet and writer,. studied law at the universities of Pavia and Genoa (I).
Early on he had published a literary magazine between 1892 and 1894, and in 1898 he published his first work in the new «free verse» style. By 1900 he had decided to devote himself entirely to Italian and French literature and poetry. He founded the international magazine «Poesia» (Poetry) in 1905 and published it in Milan from 1905 until 1909. Marinetti was on a personal crusade to liberate poetry and literature from the constraints of traditional punctuation and syntax. The publication of the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909 brought Marinetti instant notoriety. His vehement and polemic manifesto, based on the modern aesthetic principles of a fast, aggressive lifestyle, and the wonder of the machine age. By 1910 he had been joined by the artists Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo as well as a small following of musicians, poets and writers.
At this early stage of Futurism, many of its members—including Balla, Carrà, Boccioni, Russolo and many others—were anarchists, which represented a wide-ranging cultural revolution among the avant-garde. An innovative and brilliant publicist, he used modern methods to publicise his new art movement—chiefly in the form of a flood of manifestos and in the form of the «serata.» From 1913 on, these Futurist soirées were the precursor of the «Synthetic Theatre.» Performances usually included music or a performance of Russolo's «Intonarumori» or noise machines, improvised speeches (usually by Marinetti), presentations of paintings, literary and poetic readings and short dramatic plays called sintesi or syntheses. In literature, following on from his early experiments with 'free verse', he introduced the concept of 'free words', eschewing syntax and punctuation while revolutionising typography. Futurism came to an end with Italy's defeat in the war and Marinetti's death.