Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
L'alcòva d'acciaio. Romanzo vissuto, 1921
Printed book, first edition, 380 pages, colour illustrated cover
BOOKS
Milan, Casa Editrice Vitagliano. Copy of the Mart, Archivio del '900, book collection of the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura (ANSf 524).
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism, tells in this autobiographical novel his last year of the First World War, alongside his armoured car number 74. The book inspired Umberto Cavenago's sculpture La 74.
(This record is a demonstration example: its information is here to show how Artistwall works and may not be up to date. You are browsing the demo website, created to let the public discover the features and potential of the platform.) What is a demo website?
The cover of the first edition, bound into the volume
The author
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Alexandria, Egypt 1876 – Bellagio 1944), poet and writer, founded Futurism with the manifesto published in «Le Figaro» on 20 February 1909. He exalted machines, speed and war, and brought these ideas into poetry, theatre, art and life. In the First World War he fought as a volunteer.
The novel
In 1921 Marinetti published L'alcòva d'acciaio (The Steel Alcove), subtitled Romanzo vissuto (A Lived Novel), with the Vitagliano publishing house in Milan. It is the autobiographical account of his last year of war, 1918, when he was assigned to the armoured machine-gun car squadrons and took part in the final offensive, up to Vittorio Veneto. The protagonist of the book, alongside the poet, is his armoured car, a Lancia Ansaldo numbered 74, which Marinetti describes as a woman and a lover. The steel alcove of the title is the car itself: the armoured vehicle in which war and eros, man and machine merge in the Futurist vision of conflict.
The Mart copy
The copy is kept at the Mart in Rovereto, in the Archivio del '900, book collection of the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura (shelf mark ANSf 524). The title page marks it as the «eighth thousand»: the 1921 edition had several print runs. The colour illustrated cover is bound inside the volume. The Mart digitised it at 600 ppi and published it on Internet Archive in 2021, under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IT licence: the book can be browsed in full.
Umberto Cavenago's La 74
In 2006 Umberto Cavenago made La 74, an essential volume in Cor-Ten steel mounted on wheels, stripped of all weapons: instead of machine guns, inside, two bunks. The work overturns Marinetti's metaphor. The steel alcove, which for him was the place where war and eros coincided in conquest, becomes a real alcove: a space of rest and intimacy. The project is told on the page Disarmare la forma.
The cover of the first edition, bound into the volume
The title page. The copy belongs to the «eighth thousand»
Chapter VII, «La 74», p. 76: «My new lover is called 74»
The stamp of the Mart library and the shelf mark
The colophon: copyright C. E. Vitagliano, April 1921; printed by Tip.-Lit. A. Gorlini, Milan
Page 77: the first ride with the 74, through the streets of Genoa and towards Rapallo
Related projects
Nessuna opera correlata trovata