Farewell to the daughter of Futurism, Ala Marinetti, second daughter of the founder of the Avant-garde

Napoli it is the city chosen, for its dazzling lights, playful irony and dynamic and vital chaos, to Philip Thomas Marinetti for the baptism of the Futurist “movement”, whose manifesto was published on 14 February 1909 by the publisher Bideri and, only a week later, appeared on the front page of the French «Le Figaro». In Campania conferences, “incandescent” meetings, poetry declamations. On 20 April 1910 they participated in the first Neapolitan futurist evening at the Mercadante theatre Croce, Shoe, Groan, Scarfoglio, Serao! On stage Palazzeschi, Carra, Russolo, Deep sea, Mazza, drafts, Careers.

In 1914, the great Futurist exhibition in the Neapolitan gallery of Giuseppe Sprovieri. In 1916 the Futurist Manifesto of Boccioni to Southern Painters in the magazine «latin candle». In 2018, Futurism from the 10s to the 20s, the great anthological exhibition at the Maschio Angioino.
The Futurist Manifesto to the Salerno people, written by Hyerace, Trimarco, Fruscione and Mattia, was published on 10 September 1922 in the monthly magazine «It is allowed?», periodical «artistic, humorous and puppeteered». In 1910 the Neapolitan Francesco Cangiullo joined Futurism and in 1914 participated in the “Free International Exhibition” at the Sprovieri Gallery with paintings and sculptures created in collaboration with Marinetti and Balla. In 1916 he published Piedigrotta free-word poem.

In the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, on the Campidoglio hill, where she was married in 1954, the final farewell. She left 3 days after the «FT Marinetti» broadcast on RAI 3, in the second episode of “Inimitables”, broadcast on the evening of Easter Sunday, where Naples and the South are defined as «the most futuristic places with Milan» . Ala appears, alongside his mother Benedetta Cappa, of great fascinating beauty in a tartan suit, showing off timeless class. Blonde, slender, with an innate elegance, a refined intellectual full of life, a haughty and ethereal style icon, simply extraordinary, this is how you remember her with emotion Roberto Bilotti.

Ala… the flight: her futurist name contains the ideals of her parents which also became hers: freedom, dynamism, speed and optimism, which made her look to the future by experiencing the positive side of things. Creativity, imagination, talent and inventiveness were the climate in which she was born and lived. Her name is evocative of the pictorial declination of futurism as an expression of the myth of modernity experienced by the Marinettian movement.

The enthusiasm for flight symbolized by the wing is codified in the Futurist Aeropittura Manifesto, published in 1929 and signed by both parents FT and Benedetta, an overbearing desire to experience the forces of cosmic idealism, the mechanical and dynamic character of aviation and forms of fantastic, naturalistic and spiritualistic lyricism inspired by flight. She left six months before the major exhibition that the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome will dedicate to Futurism, the Italian cultural, artistic, literary and musical movement of the early 20th century as well as one of the first European avant-gardes. It had an influence on similar movements that developed in other European countries, in the United States of America and in Asia. The futurists explored every form of expression: painting, sculpture, literature, poetry, theatre, music, architecture, dance, photography, cinema, gastronomy, animated and codified by Filippo Tomaso Marinetti.

The Time of Futurism. 1909-2024, the exhibition scheduled from October 2024 to February 2025, aims to re-read the main futurist artists and other exponents and, above all, its animators, FT and Benedetta, with the scientific support of Ala and the Marinetti heirs .
Ala, in the name of flight and freedom, born at home, under the painting Dynamism of a footballer by Boccioni (a footballer who dematerializes in a luminous and darting atmosphere). The exhibition Contemporary Futurisms: from Marinetti to Boccioni, beyond the boundaries of time, a moving tribute by Chiara Donà dalle Rose and Roberto Bilotti Ruggi d’Aragona, curated by Michele Citro and Andrea Guastella – with the collaboration of the son of Ala, Leonardo Clerici — which will be held from 5 May to 9 June on the main floor of Palazzo Donà dalle Rose, in Fondamente Nove, in the Venice Biennale circuit.

We close the article with the testimony given by his nephew, Alessio Clericiat the funeral: «My Wing is unusually expressive. She is able to speak with her eyes or with just the lines of her face. My Wing always carries with it a good scent, it spreads very sharp elegance and intelligence. He is an eternally young spirit, always in step with the New. She is very skilled at identifying and cultivating deep affections. But she is never afraid of change. She has zest for life and lives for zest. My Wing never looks back. But she has a deep respect for her story and her family’s story. My Wing has courage, irony and lightness always accompany her, she glides over things from above, she has no boulders on her heart. My Wing has tact and poetry. The tenderness with which she knows how to express love always amazes her. She always amazes with the statuesqueness and epic firmness of her reproach. My Wing keeps her mind trained and her heart inflamed. Today the world loses a bit of beauty. And it is our imperative task to give birth to more of it as it vanishes».