Comrades

Benito Mussolini

By far my favorite dictator—more than Hitler, Mao, and Franco combined. Benito and I even got arrested together once. It seemed like a match made in heaven. My one complaint is that Benito just wasn't revolutionary enough. After all, he liked classical art—and that's something just unforgivably stuck in the ancient past.

My dedication to experimental avant-garde art makes no exceptions—not even for Il Duce. I wanted Futurist Art to be Fascist Italy's state art, but that was pretty much a no-go. I knew I was compromising my values when I allowed Mussolini to appoint me to the fancy position of Accademico d'Italia; remember, I supposedly hated institutions—the ivory tower included... but the benefits! I finally broke with "The Moose" when he adopted a lot of Hitler's anti-Semitism. Ciao, bello!

Umberto Boccioni

This dude was one of my all-time favorite painters. We often dined family-style at a café next to the Porta Vittoria. He drafted the "Manifesto of the Futurist Painters"—a guidebook of sorts for the next generation of artists, presenting it to me with the all the respect an acolyte should have for his leader. Not everyone thought he was a great painter, and he often got into fisticuffs over motifs and methods in his paintings. But the guy had Futurist moxie.

Luigi Russolo

Another great Milanese painter, and pals with Umberto. I love hanging with visual artists because I consider myself a multimedia kind of guy. By the way—he considered himself pretty multimedia, too: he later switched from painting to music, and that's when we kind of formed a band and made Futurist music together. Needless to say, it was highly experimental—full of vibrations, crazy acoustics, and unapologetically industrial noise. Luigi wrote all about it in "The Art of Noises."

Aldo Palazzeschi

A novelist and a poet, Aldo became one of my Futurist homies, but I never sensed I had a full commitment from him (men and commitment!). He was too much of an individual to buy into the whole Futurist mindset I wanted. The guy was actually against war, and in my opinion, no self-respecting Futurist should ever be against that, let alone admit to it.

Later, Aldo called me a czar, and that kind of soured our relationship, given that I've always been totally against old-fashioned hierarchies. But his poetry was like a madman ranting on the street—in other words, so cool.

Rivals

Gabriele D'Annunzio

I had a passionate love for this man—and a violent hatred. Like me, he was an Italian Fascist and a literary man. But he was always, always more popular than me. He had a larger readership, and we seriously competed for Mussolini's attention.

D'Annunzio was by no means a futurist, but I felt like he was stealing some of my audience, I thought it was time for him to pass the mantle, so to speak. He was too associated with the past and with the aristocracy (he was a prince, for crying out loud!) to ever be accepted into the Futurist fold. He also liked—really liked—women, which just did not harmonize with our whole anti-woman thing. I hate to sound like a second-grader, but ick!

Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume was a lovely Italian-born French poet and intellectual, but unfortunately, he did not have beaucoup bucks the way I did, so he couldn't afford to traipse around Europe publicizing his love of modernism and modernity.

He was less radical than me, anyway: he was batting for the other team—the Cubists, a group of French and Spanish painters who hung out with Picasso and questioned reality, space, and perception. Apollinaire and his peeps were not my rivals in ideas—they were my rivals for the avant-garde spotlight. The struggle had high stakes, and it was fierce.