Senza freni e senza misura nel desiderio incomposto del nuovo. Traiettorie mediterranee e visioni critiche del Futurismo

The article aims to frame the antigracious aesthetics in a southern perspective, analyzing the connections between Futurism and the South, to reflect on how the disruptive message of the wider Italian avantgarde has found acceptance in circuits and protagonists even in a South that could seem anchored to the nineteenth-century cultural tradition. Palermo and Naples were points of reference for European artists and intellectuals, such as palermitan Filippo De Maria or the Calabrian’s Vincenzo Gerace, Giuseppe Carrieri and Antonio Marasco, Matilde Serao and Benedetto Croce, who always viewed Futurism with suspicion, up to expressing his judgment aesthetic negative in a fierce controversy in 1918, preceded by the writing of Aldo Fortuna in 1914, which destroyed the revolutionary poetics of the Futurists and which was renewed around the middle of the century with Argan and Dorfles. International critics, even in America, appreciated the movement, especially after the European exhibitions of 1912. In Italy Roberto Longhi in 1913 defined the work of his friend Boccioni as "the most intellectual and profound solution". In the South, however, the two of the greatest gallery owners of the twentieth century distinguished themselves: the Calabrians Giuseppe Sprovieri and Lino Pesaro, who helped to outline that art system, which gave life to numerous exhibitions and which led the Futurists to the halls of the Venice Biennale in 1926, the same year in which they exhibited in Calabria at the IV Biennial of Calabrian art, commissioned by Alfonso Frangipane.