The history of 20th-century art and culture has been molded by the concept of avant-garde. Avant-garde movements implied a strong spirit of modernization: among these movements, Italian Futurism pursued an astonishing renovation. Founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on 20 February 1909, when he published The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, Futurism gave birth to a new kind of intellectual collective group, and to radical cultural artifacts that shaped new boundaries among the arts, according to a theoretical paradigm highly focused on contemporary society. With their works, the Futurist artists emphasized speed, technology, youth, and violence as emerging features of modern needs during the machine age.

Big changes affected Italy during the second industrial revolution: Futurism was influenced by some of these technological changes, by interpreting the first steps of industrialization in Italy as an opportunity to turn towards novelty and against an obsolete tradition.

According to Marinetti, Futurism is ‘the enthusiastic glorification of scientific discoveries and of the modern mechanism’ (Marinetti 1914: 150); therefore, ‘the triumphant progress of science’ (Boccioni et al. 1910: 62) had determined profound changes within humanity; so, through their enthusiasm for the opportunities of expression given by scientific innovations, the artists could become the spokespeople of freedom.