Mario Carli

File:Mario Carli, Capitano degli Arditi.jpg

Mario Carli, captain of the Arditi

Mario Carli (30 December 1888 – 9 September 1935) was an Italian poet, novelist, essayist and journalist. An indocile and rebellious character, founder of numerous avant-garde magazines, he gave a political consciousness to Arditism with his work and was a proponent together with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti of a "political futurism".

Carli wrote extensively, producing works like the experimental novel Background (1915), and the memoir With D’Annunzio in Fiume (1920). In 1923 he published My Divinity, a volume in which he gathered his poetry, small poems in prose among which stands out Filtered Nights — a pre-Surrealist piece of importance. The writings express Carli's conviction in life as energy, an egoistical effort at realising oneself against all odds and perils.

Biography

Carli was born in San Severo, Apulia, to a father from Romagna and a mother from Puglia. He matured artistically in Florence, collaborating with several local magazines: La difesa dell'arte (1900–1910), Il centauro (1912–1913), La rivista (1913). In the 1910s, he met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, with whom he formed a profound friendship that would last until the end, and joined Futurism, actively participating in the so-called 'blue patrol'. During those years he gave life, with the entire human group with whom he had edited those magazines, to the celebrated L'Italia futurista, the most representative publication of Futurist thought during the war, an avant-garde magazine that became the point of reference for an entire generation of young people thirsting for novelty and welcoming anyone's experiments. Emilio Settimelli, Bruno Corra, Arnaldo Ginna and Remo Chiti were part of that group.

At the outbreak of the Great War, he was relieved of his duties at the front due to severe myopia and assigned to administrative-bureaucratic tasks in Avellino. But Carli's 'craving for the trenches' was so strong that he first joined a unit of trenchers as a volunteer, then in 1917, with the creation of the Arditi, he enlisted in the 18th assault unit, an elite unit. From a simple soldier, he soon became a captain in the Royal Army, winning the silver medal for valour and the war cross in the field.

In the summer of 1918, together with Marinetti and Emilio Settimelli, he gave birth to Roma Futurista, a true tribune of Futurist Arditism. Already in the first issue he published an appeal to the Fiamme nere (the symbol that appeared on the lapels of the uniforms of the Arditi della fanteria), in which he laid the foundations for the creation of a political platform in which the soldiers who had been part of the assault troops were to converge.

In issue 9 of 10 December of the same year he published a second proclamation, Associazione tra gli Arditi di Italia (Association of the Italian Armed Forces), which set the ball rolling for the founding of the Association in Rome on 1 January 1919. At the same time, the 'Futurist Fascists' were being organised and founded in various Italian cities, just ahead of the Fasci di combattimento, and Carli set up the Futurist Fascio in Rome, the leadership of which he held until he was transferred to Cremona as a punishment. He had held a fiery rally in favour of Fiume and Dalmatia and had led, he an officer of the Italian army, a demonstration of Arditi during which Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, a delegate to the Paris Conference where he fought for the annexation of Fiume to Italy, was carried in triumph on his way from the railway station to the Quirinal.

On 23 March 1919, he was among the Sansepolcrists at the founding act of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento during the assembly in Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan.

On 11 May 1919, he founded, together with Ferruccio Vecchi, a new newspaper, L'Ardito, which a few days after its birth was banned in the barracks because, in response to the proposal of some generals to use the Black Flames in an anti-subversive function, Carli replied with the famous article "Arditi non gendarmi".

A successful journalist, he immediately took part in the Endeavour of Fiume. At Fiume he teamed up with Mino Somenzi, one of the many Jews who adhered to fascism, with futurists Cesare Cerati and Angelo Scambelluri, but above all with aviator Guido Keller.

In February 1920, he founded La Testa di Ferro (The Iron Head), a newspaper designed for Fiuman legionaries. On the pages of La Testa di Ferro Carli takes very radical and unorthodox positions. It was the period in which the Apulian journalist was fascinated by the Russian Revolution, taken as a model for a definitive assault on the liberal state, without however showing sincere adherence to the ideological promises of Bolshevism (one can more properly speak of anarcho-futurism).

Precisely because of the heterodox editorial line of La Testa di Ferro — despite Gabriele D'Annunzio's praise —, the Carnaro Regency command invited him to move the magazine's editorial office to Milan. This also entailed a momentary departure from the Mussolini line.

On the eve of Bloody Christmas, Carli with Cesare Cerati and the help of some anarchists planned an explosive attack on the Milan power station to be carried out on 28 December 1920. Furthermore, from the columns of La Testa di Ferro he exhorted the citizens to armed insurrection. For this he was arrested and kept in prison.

Once the Fiume period was over, Carli, together with his friend Emilio Settimelli, approached the monarchist milieu and on 21 April 1922 founded Il Principe, a newspaper that gathered together the futurist exiles who did not follow Marinetti and (not yet) Mussolini. Among others: Volt, Mario Dessy, Bruno Corra and Ernesto Daquanno.

After these ups and downs, following the March on Rome, he definitively joined Fascism and, with Settimelli, founded the daily L'Impero on 11 March 1923. The newspaper founded by Carli first of all has the merit of recomposing the fragmentations that were created during the years between the end of the First World War and the March on Rome. In fact, Marinetti signed the manifesto of L'impero italiano with Carli and Settimelli (25 April 1923) and many of those who had taken part in Carli's previous publishing initiatives began to collaborate with the new organ.

With this new experience Carli set himself as a sentinel of radical and intransigent fascism, in open and bitter polemic with those liberal intellectuals who were rushing to the victor's bandwagon. There was in Carli's L'impero "the search for a new atmosphere (which) took place under the banner of an 'intransigent fascism', which implied the identification of a modern way of life...". The L'impero experience came to an end in the early 1930s.

Between 1930 and 1932 he embarked on a new editorial experience with Oggi e domani, the end of which coincided with his appointment as Consul General of Italy in Porto Alegre, Brazil, then Thessaloniki, Greece, where he resided from 1934 to 1935.

Stricken by an incurable illness, he returned to Rome where, on 9 September 1935, he died at the age of 47. He rests in the Verano monumental cemetery. On this subject, the arditi Piero Bolzon said: "That Carli should die of a slow disease is terrible, it is pain, to which I still cannot adapt. Only a heroic end, which failed him, would have been worthy of such exceptional youth".

See also

• Umberto Barbaro
• Dante Carnesecchi
• Renzo Novatore
• Vinicio Paladini
• Ivo Pannaggi
• Renzo Provinciali

Works

• Retroscena (1915; novel)
• Notti filtrate (1918)
• Sii brutale amor mio! Romanzo-battaglia (1919)
• Noi arditi (1919)
• Con d'Annunzio a Fiume (1920; 2013)
• Addio mia sigaretta (1920)
• Trillirì (1922; 2013; novel)
• La mia divinità (1923)
• Fascismo Intransigente (1926; 2007)
• Colloqui coi vivi (1928)
• Cervelli di ricambio (1928)
• Arditismo (1929)
• Antisnobismo (1929)
• L'italiano di Mussolini (1930; novel)
• Il mio cuore fra i reticolati (1934; written in 1918)
• Incontro con Bottai (1938; with Bruno D'Agostini)
• Il Nostro Bolscevismo (1996)
• Notti filtrate e altri scritti (2009; edited by Francesco Magliuolo)
• Il mio cuore fra i reticolati (2014)
• Le seduzioni. Tre racconti (2021; with an introduction by Barbara Meazzi)

References

Baldini, Anna (2023). "Modernismo Fascista e Modernità Italiana (1925-1929): Parigi, Firenze, Roma." In: A Regola d’arte: Storia e Geografia Del Campo Letterario Italiano (1902-1936). Quodlibet, pp. 185–270.

Daly, Selena (2016). "Futurism at the Front: Futurist Military and Combat Experiences." In: Italian Futurism and the First World War. University of Toronto Press, pp. 50–87.

Donati, Daniele (2023). "Il «tradimento Degli Intellettuali» Tra Fascismo e Antifascismi." In: Nello Spirito Del Tempo: L’influenza Della Cultura Sull’evoluzione Del Sistema Giuridico Istituzionale. Quodlibet, pp. 59–72.

Giuliani, Francesco (1991). Il poeta futurista Mario Carli. Il mito della Giovinezza. Roma: Foggia.

Giuliani, Francesco (1998). Mario Carli, in Gli anni del Futurismo in Puglia 1909/1944. Bari: Adda.

Galmozzi, Enrico (1996). "Saggio Introduttivo." In: Mario Carli, Il nostro bolscevismo. Milano: Società Editrice Barbarossa.

Leo, Carlo (2021). "Introduzione." In: Mario Carli, Con D'Annunzio a Fiume. Prose belliche e fiumane. Roma-Cesena: Giubilei Regnani.

Lista, Giovanni (1980). Arte e politica: il futurismo di sinistra in Italia. Milano: Multhipla Edizioni.

Magnarelli, Paola (1977). "Carli, Mario." In: Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Vol. 20. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.

Salaris, Claudia (2002). Alla festa della rivoluzione. Artisti e libertari con D'Annunzio a Fiume. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Tarquini, Alessandra (2022). A History of Italian Fascist Culture, 1922–1943. University of Wisconsin Press.

External links

• Works by Mario Carli at Persée
• Works by Mario Carli at Open Library