The mechanical object is, in many ways, the Futurist symbol par excellence, whether we think of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's crashed automobile, Luigi Russolo's ‘noise-tuner’ machines or Fortunato Depero's mechanised puppets. And yet, somewhat surprisingly, until now no scholar has attempted to holistically consider the significance of the machine for exponents of Futurism across the disciplines of painting, literature, music, dance, and photography. For this, and many other reasons, Katia Pizzi's new book is an extremely important contribution to the field. As she states in the introduction and argues convincingly throughout, after the First World War ‘machines become the very syntax and architecture of futurist aesthetics and ideology’ (p. 2). She establishes that ‘it was precisely through the conduit of the machine, especially the industrial machine, that the culture of Italian Futurism remained part and parcel of a modern cosmopolitan avant-garde after the First World War’ (p. 13). Thus, while Pizzi does not neglect the years prior to 1918, her primary interest lies in the (lamentably) still lesser-known decades of Futurist activity from the 1920s to the 1940s. This, along with her decision to focus on Futurist figures who cannot boast immediate name recognition among the uninitiated, is one of the book's great strengths.

The book is divided into six chapters and bookended by an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter usefully complements the introduction by exploring the context of Italian modernity into which the Futurists first emerged in 1909. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the undisputed leader of the movement, is the focus of the second chapter, which explores his ‘fetishist enthusiasm for war technology’ (p. 62) before and during both World Wars. The photograph of Marinetti on a tractor (p. 52), which I had never seen before, is an amusing and novel choice to illustrate this chapter and avoids the tired and familiar image of Marinetti on his soon-to-be-crashed automobile in 1908. The third chapter concentrates on the figure of Depero as he travelled from his native Trentino to the metropolis of New York, tracing the development of his machine aesthetic which existed between the ‘traditional-artisanal and the modern-industrial’ (p. 92). A diverse cast of characters populates Chapter 4, including Avgust Černigoj, Vinicio Paladini, Ivo Pannaggi, and Ruggero Vasari. Pizzi sees them as representing, collectively, a ‘“frontier futurism”: transcending national borders and the confines of culture and language’ (p. 169). All of these left-leaning artists worked on the peripheries of Marinetti's orbit and looked to central and eastern Europe for support and inspiration that would be more consonant with their political ideologies.

Chapters 5 and 6 move on to consider the development of aerofuturismo, which explored machines’ spiritual rather than material properties. Chapter 5 narrows the focus onto the better-known figures of Enrico Prampolini and Fillìa (born Luigi Colombo) while Chapter 6 showcases the dazzling variety and complexity of this subset of Futurist activity, ranging from poetry, painting, ‘useless’ objects, photography, and dance. In this period, industrial machines were replaced by flying ones and ‘Futurist trajectories were no longer drawn on a horizontal line, but, rather, a vertical one’ (p. 220). After the earliest analysis of Marinetti's sexualisation of the machine, the attention afforded to women's contributions to Futurism's aerial aesthetics is particularly welcome, whether in painting as epitomised by figures like Maria Ginanni and Benedetta or in dance through Giannina Censi (pp. 230–44). Pizzi's consideration of Censi's experience effectively sums up some of the paradoxes of Mussolini's regime. As a single mother, she was condemned by Fascist society but her lithe aerodance poses were utilised in Fascist propaganda to promote the ideal body of a fertile, healthy Italian woman (p. 242). The book's conclusion provides a fascinating coda to the themes explored throughout, reflecting on the influence of Futurist machine aesthetics on popular culture, from The Terminator to Beyoncé's experiments with afrofuturism.

Pizzi's work is firmly situated on the cutting-edge of Futurism Studies. It does not ignore the centrality of Marinetti to the movement's success and longevity but dedicates more of its analysis to lesser-known Futurists, whose contributions have long been overshadowed by the more iconic protagonists active in the 1910s. Her approach is also resoundingly transnational, constantly stressing the interconnectedness of artistic centres across Europe and further afield, which contributes to our understanding of the influences of and on Italian Futurism outside Italy.

This is an immensely rich book based on extensive archival research. It fully captures the multi-disciplinary nature of the Futurist movement and its contributions to multiple fields of activity. It will be of interest to all those keen to learn more about this central element of Futurist ideology as well as scholars of European avant-garde and modernist culture more broadly. It is to be hoped that Pizzi's recent appointment as Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London will not prevent her from producing more first-rate scholarship on Italy's most important avant-garde movement.