8 h 53 minAudiobook13 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
Readers who like firsthand war writing, bold experimental prose, the story of the Italian Front, the Futurist movement, or a vivid personal voice that mixes jokes, poetry, machines and battle.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Pranks and brothels before the great battle
- The Austrian offensive of June 1918
- Victory parades and a prize in Modena
- A madman, painted ships and the lover numbered 74
- Rapallo's moonlit dance of the wounded
- Leave, salons and a cold farewell to Bianca
- Debating cavalry and waiting for the Piave
- Across the Piave and into Vittorio Veneto
- The liberated villages and the bells of Friuli
- The captured army and the last night in the steel alcove
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- Audiobook
- 8 h 53 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
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- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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The Steel Alcove
by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti · 1921
A Futurist poet in an armored car races across Italy in 1918, chasing a victory he calls his lover.
Medium level5–10 hours to read25 languages
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In short
The Steel Alcove is the war diary of F. T.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Pranks and brothels before the great battle
The diary opens on June 1, 1918, in a bombardiers' barracks on a mountain ridge in Val d'Astico. Marinetti and about twenty officers eat spaghetti at sunset. He turns the meal into a game by ordering everyone to shift two places to the right, which leaves the doctor with his plate in his lap. The jokes are a way to push away what he calls the offensive of loving memories.
The officers around him are drawn in quick strokes. Colonel Squilloni is a Florentine with a guitar and a chest of medals. Captain Melodia is a cavalryman famous for wild tricks, and he tells how he once hid in a coffin to escape a hospital. Marinetti's orderly Ghiandusso and his little war dog Zazà are always at his side.
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What is The Steel Alcove about?
It is Marinetti's diary of the last months of the First World War on the Italian Front in 1918, from the Austrian offensive in June to the victory in early November, told in a loud Futurist style.
Who is Marinetti and what is Futurism?
Marinetti was an Italian poet who founded Futurism, an artistic movement that celebrated speed, machines, youth and war, and rejected old traditions in art, writing and politics.
What does the steel alcove mean in the book?
It is Marinetti's name for the inside of his armored machine-gun car, number 74, which he describes as a gleaming bridal chamber where he imagines Italy herself coming to lie in his arms.
The author
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
1876–1944 · Italian Futurist poet
Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement.
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