Le illustrazioni sonore, tattili e odorose di F.T. Marinetti

The futurist revolution launched by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his famous manifesto of 1909 spanned all fields of culture: from literature, visual arts, music, architecture, applied arts, theatre to include life itself. Even the illustrated book, which had been fossilized for too long time on a ‘static’ separation between text and image, could not escape this reforming based on the speed and sensorial si- multaneity brought by the new technologies. Marinetti futuristically redeemed this passéist impasse with his ‘words-in-freedom’ and the ‘free-word-tables’, in which through the typographic illustration he succeeded in uniting the verbal and visual aspects in a single organism. Finally, with the creation of the first ‘Lito-latta’ books, the father of Futurism transforms the traditional illustrated book into a ‘device’ able to synthesizing all sensory qualities (sight, touch, hearing and smell), thus transforming the illustrated book into a ‘object-book’.