Cangiullo in Terza Pagina La produzione pubblicistica sulla stampa locale, nazionale e internazionale del futurista napoletano Francesco Cangiullo (1909-1924)

Abstract

The present work fits into the exegetical process that brought to light the phenomenon of Parthenopian Futurism, incarnated by Francesco Cangiullo, an isolated manifestation of the first Neapolitan Futurism. Along his avant-garde militancy (1912-1924) Cangiullo was alone, without any local allies, culturally marginalized. As a matter of fact Marinetti didn’t manage to get a proselyte. The advent of Futurism showed all the weaknesses of Parthenopian intelligentsia, incapable of a true adversarial. Nevertheless, Marinetti always had words of praise for Naples, for its transgression and its gestures so futuristic. Cangiullo is the only one who answered to Marinetti’s announcement. He performed a delicate role as a link between the futuristic subversion and parthenopian folk, between Avant-garde and Tradition. To the main futurists his engagement serves as a secret weapon against the rhetoric, as a symbol of spontaneity and irrationality against the artifices of Italian culture. Yet Cangiullo ( leading figure of the Futurism) was always given a critical approval; many studies, but all incoherent and sectoral, never final or monographs. In fact, his huge journalistic production is unknown till today. The choice to devote new critical attention to this field of his activity is an outcome of a relatively poor exegesis. Cangiullo crossed transversely all the thematic spectrum of Futurism; decided to add to his brilliant artistic career a parallel journalist activity, anticipating in diverse periodicals his creative proposals. The poor performance in publishing ( Marinetti neglected him ) drove Cangiullo to search for some other ways to get himself well known and to produce such a quantity of articles that it oversteps the boundaries of his today’s bibliography , many of these writings were entirely forgotten by careless and superficial criticism. It was during his maximum adhesion to Futurism when Cangiullo loosened his grip on Marinetti and started his collaboration with smaller papers, never organic, often traditional. As an example stands a roman paper “Piccolo Giornale d’Italia”, with many Cangiullo’s appearances’ in the decade between 1914 and 1923, but subjected to small bibliographical work; 13 articles reported so far, 49 new never mentioned elsewhere. There are a total of 54 Cangiullo’s compositions never notified before, to which should be added not a few of unpublished compositions here found and brought to the attention of the reader. All Cangiullo’s activity must be redefined in the light of the discoveries made in the present work, which aim seems to be to anthologize enormous wealth of articles, but which reveals itself in its truth: to retrace the guidelines of a protean career, largely unknown, which in all its development was always preceded, accompanied and glossed by the testimony of the author assigned to the press.