A century before the Tourist go home and the avalanches of cruise passengers, a group of Italian intellectuals led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, precursor of futurism and creator of the intellectual apparatus of fascism, flooded Venice with some leaflets denouncing the mass tourism that was already invading the city. Published in Italian and French, the activists dropped from the Torre dell’Orologio in Piazza San Marco in June 1910 a first batch of 200,000 flying leaves, to which another 800,000 would later be added, this time also with an English edition.
“We repudiate the Venice of foreigners, a market for counterfeit antique dealers, a magnet for universal snobbery and imbecility, a bed torn apart by caravans of lovers, a jeweled bath for cosmopolitan courtesans, the last sewer of the past. We want to heal and heal this rotten city. We want to revive and ennoble the Venetian people, who have fallen from their former greatness, transformed by a disgusting cowardice and discouraged by the habit of their shady little trades, “said the leaflet.
“We want to prepare for the birth of an industrial and military Venice. Let us hasten to fill the little stinking canals with the rubble of the old collapsed and leprous buildings. Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for idiots, and raise to the sky the imposing geometry of metal bridges and smoke-covered factories, to abolish the warped curves of ancient architecture”, he concluded.
The aggressive campaign culminated on August 1 with what is known as the “Futuristic Speech to the Venetians”, which Marinetti himself delivered no more and no less than at the Teatro La Fenice and which we offer in the version set by the author himself. An intervention that began with the boos of the Venetians who had attended the event, encouraged by the controversy that the actions of the young intellectuals had aroused, profusely reported by the press, and that ended with altercations, as it could not be otherwise.
By now, Marinetti and his crew had already made a name for themselves. Especially after the publication a year before the front page of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro of the “Futurist Manifesto”, which along the same lines glorified war – “the only hygiene in the world”, he pointed out -, militarism, patriotism and contempt for women and called to destroy museums, libraries and combat moralism and feminism.
In short, the deed of a man and a new world that have been proclaimed since then by so many other revolutions. No tourists, of course.
“Venetians!
“When we shout: ‘Let us kill the moonlight!’, we think of you, old Venice drenched in romance! But now our voice is amplified and we add high notes. Let’s free the world from the tyranny of love! We are sick of erotic adventures, lust, sentimentality and nostalgia!
”Then why insist on Venice, offering us veiled women in every twilight bend of your canals? Enough! Stop whispering obscene invitations to all the passers-by of the earth or of Venice, dirty old woman, who under your heavy mosaic mantle still insists on preparing exhausting romantic nights, plaintive serenades and frightful ambushes!
“I also loved, oh Venice, the sumptuous half-light of your Grand Canal, impregnated with rare lust, and the feverish pallor of your beauties, who glide from the balconies down stairways criss-crossed with lightning, threads of rain and moonbeams between clinking of crossed swords…
”But enough! All these absurd, abominable and irritating things make us sick! And now we want electric lamps with a thousand points of light to brutally cut and tear your mysterious, bewitching and persuasive darkness!
“Your Grand Canal, widened and excavated, will inevitably become a great merchant port. Trains and trams hurtling down the great streets built on the finally drained canals will bring you loads of goods, amongst a cunning, rich and busy crowd of industrialists and merchants!
“The bikes on which we find the first lines of the grand futuristic aesthetic can always be used to crush some disgusting, grotesque Nordic professor in a Tyrolean hat.
“But you want to bow down to all strangers, and you are repulsive servility!
Venetians! Venetians! Why want to continue being the faithful slaves of the past, the filthy keepers of the biggest brothel in history, the nurses of the saddest hospital in the world, where mortally corrupt souls languish in the light of sentimentality?
“Oh! I am not lacking in images, if I want to define your vain and foolish inertia as that of a son of a great man or the husband of a famous singer! Your gondoliers, could I not compare them to gravediggers intent on digging graves in a flooded cemetery? But nothing can offend you, since your humility is limitless!
”It is also known that you have the wise concern of enriching the Society of the Great Hotels, and that precisely for this reason you persist in rotting without moving!
“Yet you were once invincible warriors and brilliant artists, daring navigators, ingenious industrialists and tireless merchants… And you have become hotel waiters, guides, street vendors, antique dealers, swindlers, antique painting makers, plagiarists and copyists . Have you forgotten, then, that you are above all Italians, and that this word, in history, means: builders of the future?
“Oh! Do not defend yourselves by accusing the degrading effects of sirocco! It was this torrid and warlike wind that filled the sails of the heroes of Lepanto! This same African wind will suddenly accelerate, in a hellish afternoon, the deaf work of the corrosive waters that undermine your venerable city.
“Oh! How will we dance that day! Oh! How we will applaud the lagoons, to incite them to destruction! And what an immense round dance we will dance around the illustrious ruin! We will all be madly joyful, we last rebellious students in this world too wise!
Thus, oh Venetians, we sang, danced and laughed before the agony of the island of Philae, which died like a decrepit mouse behind the Aswan Dam, an immense trap with electric hatches, in which the futuristic genius of England imprisons the fleeting sacred waters of the Nile!
“Shrug your shoulders and shout at me that I am a barbarian incapable of savoring the divine poems that float on your enchanted islands! Shut up! You don’t have to be too proud of it!
”Free Torcello, Burano, the Island of the Dead, from all the sick literature and from all the immense romantic reverie that the poets poisoned by the fever of Venice have veiled from them, you can laugh with me when you consider those islands as heaps of manure that! mammoths pooped here and there as they waded through prehistoric lagoons!
“But you look at them stupidly, happy to rot in their dirty water, endlessly enriching the Society of Great Hotels, which carefully prepares the elegant evenings of all the greats of the earth!
“Of course, it is not a trivial matter to excite them to love. Even if your guest is an Emperor, he will have to navigate for a long time in the filth of this immense aquarium full of historical fragments, the gondoliers will have to dig with their oars several kilometers of liquefied excrement, in a divine smell of latrine that passes next to boats full of beautiful rubbish, in the midst of equivocal floating cones, in order to reach a goal of a true Emperor, happy with himself and with his imperial sceptre!
“Behold, what has been your glory until today, O Venetians!
“What a shame! What a shame! And throw you on top of each other, like sandbags to form the bastion, on the border while we prepare a great and strong industrial, commercial and military Venice in the Adriatic, a great Italian lake!”
