F.T. Marinetti
We turn our backs on the ancient Venice, worn out and brought to ruin by centuries of pleasure-seeking, although once even we loved that city and took it to our hearts, in a great nostalgic dream.
We reject the Venice of foreigners, this marketplace of fake antique dealers, this magnet for universal snobbism and imbecility, this bed worn out by endless droves of lovers, this bath adorned with jewels for cosmopolitan whores, this immense sewer of traditionalism.
We wish to cure and begin the healing process of this putrescent city, this magnificent carbuncle from the past. We want to bring the Venetian people back to life, to ennoble them, fallen as they are from their former greatness, stupefied by a sickening spinelessness and humiliated by their habitual, shady little businesses.
We wish to prepare for the birth of an industrial and military Venice which can dominate the Adriatic, this great Italian lake.
We rush to fill in its stinking little canals, with the rubble of its crumbling, pock-marked palaces.
We’ll set fire to the gondolas, rocking chairs for cretins, and we’ll raise up to the skies the imposing geometry of metal bridges and factories plumed with smoke, so as to abolish the drooping curves of its ancient architecture.
Let the reign of divine Electric Light begin at last, to liberate Venice from the whorish moonlight of its furnished bedrooms.
F.T. Marinetti (1910)
