Painting, sculpture, poetry, theater, and architecture were not the only arts that attracted Futurist attention. Because Futurism was meant to be all-embracing, a template for the life to come, it should also—Marinetti insisted—embrace food. Food was not “subsidiary.” The Futurist, not to coin a phrase, was what he or she ate. To start with, this required a new use of language, one which was fully Italian and not “corrupted” by linguistic borrowings from elsewhere. What most Italians called a sandwich, for example, became in Futurist-speak a traidue (between-the-two). There would be no more bars; they would be replaced by quisibeves (here-one-drinks), and staffed not by barmen, only mescitori (mixers); what they mixed were not cocktails but polibibite (multiple drinks). If the Futurist wished to hop in his roaring, rampaging, bellowing, farting, prophetic six-cylinder Fiat and take his girl for a spin in the countryside, they would eat not a picnic but a pranzoalsole (meal-in-the-sun).
But Marinetti and (probably to a lesser extent) his brothers in Futurism were not content with mere shifts of vocabulary, which, in any case, never took hold in Italy or anywhere else (much the way not many people are heard ordering “freedom fries” today). They wanted to change the Italian diet by eliminating pastasciutta from it—all forms of macaroni must go and never come back. A more doomed and futile enterprise could scarcely be imagined. Pasta is a sacred food throughout Italy. In Rome there is even a museum of pasta, dedicated to the hundreds of varieties of it, from angel-hair strands to big sheets for timballi of the kind so lovingly described by Giuseppe di Lampedusa in The Leopard, from pinhead-sized semolina pasta to floppy pouches designed to contain ricotta, spinach, or purées of chicken in balsamella. It is the universal democratic food par excellence, as pizza and hamburgers are in America.
The very idea of launching an attack on a substance so bound up with Italy’s self-image must have seemed like a kind of cultural suicide. But Marinetti hated pasta. He thought it made Italians gross, lazy, complacent, stupid, and, worst of all, unfit for combat. The mayor of Naples could and did go on record as saying that the very angels in Heaven ate vermicelli al pomodoro, but that cut no ice with Marinetti. “Since everything in modern civilization tends toward elimination of weight, and increased speed, the cooking of the future must conform to the ends of evolution. The first step will be the elimination of pasta from the diet of Italians.”
His hatred of pasta came from his army service on the Austrian front. “The Futurists who fought at Selo, on the Vertoibizza … are ready to testify that they always ate the most awful pasta, delayed and transformed into a cold, congealed mass by the artillery barrages of the enemy, which separated the orderlies and the cooks from the warriors. Who could have hoped for hot pasta al dente?” Wounded at the Case di Zagora in the May 1917 offensive, he was brought down on a stretcher to Plava, where a soldier cook gave him “a miraculous chicken broth…[although] terrible Austrian shells were crashing down on the battalion kitchen and smashing his stoves. Marinetti had his first doubts then on the suitability of pasta as a food for war.” He had observed that the bombardiers, who were firing their mountain howitzers against the Austrians, never touched the ignoble stuff. Their usual sustenance was “a lump of chocolate smeared with mud and sometimes a horse meat steak, cooked in a frying pan that had been washed out with eau de cologne.” Chocolate, eau de cologne, horse meat: already the elements of Futurist recipes, which depended so heavily on discord, on the flight from traditional harmonies, were assembling as substances of “heroism” in Marinetti’s mind.
In an interview he gave sometime later to an Italian journalist, Marinetti railed against pasta. “Ugh! What piggish stuff, macaroni!”
To get the message across, paintings, prints, photographs, and everything that happens to depict it must vanish from our houses; and publishers must recall their books from the shops to subject them to rigorous censorship, deleting without pity.… In a few months just hearing its name spoken—macaroni, ugh!—people will throw up. The task is colossal. To destroy something only one hand is needed to light the fuse, but to rebuild it [as a cuisine adapted to our times] thousands and thousands of hands are necessary.
Another journalist, writing in the French newspaper Comoedia in the early 1930s, echoed Marinetti by blaming pastasciutta for the “languid sentimentalism” with which “eternal Rome, from Horace to Panzini, has defied the passing of time”:
Today we need to remake the Italian man, for what point is there in having him raise his arm in the Roman salute if he can rest it without effort on his bulging stomach? Modern man must have a flat stomach.… Look at the Negro, look at the Arab. Marinetti’s gastronomic paradox aims at education.
So what would Italians of the future actually eat? “This Futurist cooking of ours,” trumpeted Marinetti, “tuned to high speeds like the motor of a hydroplane, will seem to some trembling traditionalists both mad and dangerous; but its ultimate aim is to create a harmony between man’s palate and his life.… Until now men have fed themselves like ants, rats, cats, or oxen. Now, with the Futurists, the first human way of eating is born.”
Thus the “Aeropainter” Fillia (the pseudonym of the Torinese artist Luigi Colombo) proposed what he termed “Aerofood.” The diner is served from the right with black olives, fennel hearts, and kumquats; to his left, a waiter places a rectangle made of sandpaper, silk, and velvet, which he strokes as he eats, enjoying the contrasts of taste and texture. As he eats, waiters spray the back of his neck with a conprofumo of carnations while, from an unseen source in the kitchen, the violent roar of an aircraft motor (conrumore) and some musical accompaniment by Bach (dismusica) are heard. Thus all the diner’s senses will be mobilized, to ecstasy. Another invention of Fillia’s was a dish called “the Excited Pig”: a crazed phallic pun consisting of a whole salami, skinned, standing erect in a dish containing very hot black espresso mixed with “a good deal of eau de cologne.” A third was titled “Hunting in Heaven.” Slow-poach a hare in spumante mixed with cocoa powder. When the liquid is absorbed, dunk the creature in lemon juice, and serve it in a “copious” salsa verde based on spinach and juniper, decorated with silver pellets suggestive of huntsmen’s shot. The artist Enrico Prampolini, also an Aeropainter, came up with an elaborate proposal for a dish he called “Equator + North Pole.” Poach an “equatorial sea” of golden egg yolks, from which will rise a cone of stiffly whipped egg white; bombard the peak of the cone with slices of black truffle “shaped to look like black airplanes.” This sounds, at least, conventionally edible, unlike the sexual-metaphor dish proposed by the very minor Futurist art critic P. A. Saladin, “ManandWomanatmidnight.” Make a large pool of red zabaglione. Arrange on it a “nice big onion ring,” transfixed by a stalk of candied angelica, and two candied chestnuts, presumably symbolizing the midnight lover’s coglioni.