La seduzione e la guerra in Come si seducono le donne

My analysis focuses on F.T. Marinetti’s Come si seducono le donne, which he dictated to his friend B. Corra on a September morning in 1916 while he was temporarily away from the front line. This critical and scabrous manual comprises eleven chapters and each one of them addresses the ideal futurist man to explain him how to seduce a woman. To this end, Marinetti provides autobiographical examples that aim to instruct the young members of the Futurist Movement to become “good futurists”, if they wanted to. According to Marinetti, these young men can reach this status by either writing free verse poetry or devoting themselves to love or war. In Come si seducono le donne, Marinetti acquits a perfect lover to a perfect soldier on the ground of the qualities they both must have to succeed. The main objective of this study is twofold. On the one hand, it help investigating the war experience, which is developed in a very peculiar way in this work, despite being one of Marinetti’s recurring themes. On the other hand, it aims to examine this literary work to understand the ideal conceptualisation of the futurists as “men-soldiers”.