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By the time we come to Futurism itself we find a really specific commitment to the modern, to the mechanical. The urban. The poet Paolo Buzzi had written in 1908 , in a poem dedicated to Boccioni:

"Raise the massive constructions of the future city, Raise them into the free open sky of the aviator"

Marinetti in 1909 has no room for the indolent waterside porters described by Symonds:

"We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung from clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts; flashing in the sun with the glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks" etc etc..

Today this sort of thing sounds like totalitarian bluster, to say nothing of ecological suicide. But my God, it must have been fun to be a Futurist, to have blasted and bombadiered, to have been utterly convinced of the present and the future! Today we are so cravenly uncertain about both. A voice in yesterday's Evening Standard gives hope; that of an American designer, who when asked about the Millennium Wheel said "I'm a traditionalist. But this is the twentyfirst century, so let's get on with it." I like that. It is reassuring precisely because he is a traditionalist.

At the heart of Futurism lay the city. Boccioni's great paintings; The city Rises, Riot in the Galleria, Raid, The Forces of the Street (all 1910, 1911); Severini's paintings were responses to the modern city; but because Futurism had a political agenda it also had plans for the city, Sant'Elia in his manifesto of futurist architecture declares "We are men of the great hotels, the railway stations, the immense street, colossal ports, covered markets, luminous arcades, straight roads and beneficial demolitions." (One beneficial demolition proposed by Marinetti was that of the entirety of Venice.)

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