8 h 53 minAudiobook4 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens when a poet sees an armored car as both a weapon and a bedroom?
In The Steel Alcove, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti takes you to the Italian front in the First World War. The poet who founded Futurism draws on his own service as a volunteer, mixing diary, memoir and fiction. Danger and machinery fill a world he presents as loud, fast and charged with feeling.
At the book's heart stands an armored car: a steel shell that becomes a private nook where war and desire meet. Marinetti treats love and combat as forms of the same energy. His short, broken, loud sentences bring that fever onto the page. This is the front through a fervent participant's eyes, not a sober, balanced account.
What you’ll discover
- A poet at war Follow Marinetti from the poet's desk into his account of service at the Italian front.
- The steel bedroom Explore the strange central image that brings armored machinery and private desire together.
- Love beside combat Encounter a vision in which love and war share the same restless energy.
- Sentences built for speed Feel the force of short, broken sentences shaped by Marinetti's Futurist habits.
- A troubling point of view Read a heated personal vision of war with room to question its fervor.
Who will love it
For readers curious about Futurism, Italian modernism or the First World War seen through a fervent volunteer, and anyone drawn to the meeting of machinery, danger and desire.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A poet who worshipped speed and machines
- The armored car becomes a bedroom
- Love and war share the same fever
- A bold style and a troubling legacy
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- Large print hardcover
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El alcove de acero
by F. T. Marinetti · 1921
Marinetti's armored car becomes a steel bedroom where speed, love and danger meet on the Italian front.
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1 of 4
A poet who worshipped speed and machines
To read this book, you need to know Marinetti's creed. In 1909 he published the Futurist manifesto, which called for a break with the past. It praised speed, engines, noise and daring, and it attacked museums, tradition and caution. Marinetti wanted art to move like a car or an aeroplane.
He also believed that war could clean out a tired society. That belief explains why he pressed for Italy to join the First World War and why he went to fight himself. For him the war was a stage where Futurist ideas would be tested in real life.
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What is The Steel Alcove about?
It is Marinetti's account of his First World War service on the Italian front, written as a lived novel. It centers on an armored car as a steel refuge and mixes war, speed and love.
What does the title The Steel Alcove mean?
An alcove is a small private nook, usually for sleeping. Steel here points to the armored car, which Marinetti treats as a shelter and an intimate space as well as a war machine.
Is The Steel Alcove a true story?
It is based on the author's real wartime experience but shaped as a novel. Marinetti wrote it after the First World War, so it mixes lived events with literary freedom.
The author
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
1876–1944 · Italian Futurist poet
Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement.
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