Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter provides an overview of Italian Futurism. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist movement championed the notion of synthetic brevity. Notwithstanding Marinetti’s cultural origins in nineteenth-century literature, art, and thought, he aimed to defy the authority of origins altogether. For all its professed contempt for the past, Futurism left a more enduring mark than perhaps any other avant-garde of the twentieth century, more particularly in its creative disdain for immortalization. Futurism wished to abolish cultural patrimony. How, then, do we approach the movement now that it forms part of European aesthetic and historical patrimony itself? The chapter explains that the Futurist rhetoric of youth and virility lent enormous impetus to Benito Mussolini’s Fascist revolution. It also notes how Futurism’s adherents swelled in number between the World Wars.</jats:p>