Ennio Valentinelli: A Forgotten Futurist

Introduction

The name of Ennio Valentinelli, a Futurist free-word poet born in 1894 in Trentino (at the time an Italian-speaking province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), will be unfamiliar to most readers, even those well-versed in the history of Futurism. This Futurist has never been the subject of a single journal article, let alone a full-length study or exhibition. The details about Valentinelli that have been recorded to date in Futurist scholarship are scant, to say the least. In contrast to this present-day oblivion, during the years of “heroic” Futurism, and particularly during the years of World War I, Valentinelli was a well-known Futurist and was closely connected to many of the movement’s protagonists, particularly Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni and Fortunato Depero. The primary reason for this scholarly neglect is the fact that until now, the pseudonym that Valentinelli used in his Futurist works from 1914 to 1919 has never been identified. Valentinelli was in fact the Futurist free-word poet Acciaio (later Acciai), one of the most frequent contributors to L’Italia Futurista, the movement’s main periodical during the war years. Not only did his compositions appear in the pages of L’Italia Futurista, but his work also featured in the Grande Esposizione Nazionale del Futurismo, the large-scale touring exhibition held in Milan and Genoa in spring and summer 1919, with the aim of re-launching Futurism after the war. Nine of Acciaio’s works featured in the tavole parolibere section of the exhibition, making him the best-represented artist of this category.¹

To date, the only piece of scholarly documentation on the figure of Valentinelli comes in the brief biographical entry by Maurizio Scudiero in Ezio Godoli’s Dizionario del futurismo (2001), in which no mention of the pseudonym Acciaio is made. Scudiero states that “si hanno pochissime notizie [di Valentinelli], nella maggior parte indirette,”² and records only the briefest of information: his date of birth and death;³ his early proximity to the Futurists of Rovereto in 1913, including Depero; and his distancing from Futurism in the early 1920s. Scudiero also states that there are only two “testimonianze del suo impegno in questo settore [Futurism]:” a tavola parolibera on a war subject which was found in Giacomo Balla’s studio, dating from July 1914, which has since been lost, and an unpublished manifesto entitled “L’arte degli odori,” which theorized about a “nuovo lirismo olfattivo.”⁴ Scudiero provides no information whatsoever about Valentinelli’s Futurist activities during World War I, as it was during this period that he published almost exclusively under the name of Acciaio.

It will be my task in the following pages to rehabilitate the memory of this Futurist poet by linking the names of Valentinelli and Acciaio for the first time, engaging in both a reconstruction of his Futurist biography, and in an analysis of his pseudonymous Futurist free-word poems, composed while serving with the Italian Army during the war. This analysis of Valentinelli points to a broader need to reconsider Futurist combat experiences of World War 1 and the ways in which they related to subsequent artistic and literary production. In the few existing studies of Futurist combat experiences during the Great War, the focus is invariably placed on the exploits of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Antonio Sant’Elia, Ugo Piatti and Mario Sironi in the Battaglione Lombardo dei Volontari Ciclisti e Automobilisti between June and November 1915.⁵ The fact that so many Futurists fought together in a single battalion has provided scholars with an attractive collective experience to observe, and this period is often used as a shorthand for Futurist experiences of combat, with events occurring after this point relegated to a mere footnote in Futurist history. Enrico Crispolti concluded his account of this Battalion and its disbandment by writing “l’avventura bellica di gruppo dei futuristi è finita. Gli impegni militari si rinnoveranno singoli e disparati, e per alcuni con esito fatale.”⁶ A statement such as this denies any subsequent military experiences of playing a role in accounts of Futurism during...