Palazzo Merulana 2025: Rome's Most Personal Art Collection

Why Italian Futurism couldn't survive Fascism — and what the Scuola Romana did instead

Italian Futurism's relationship with Fascism is one of the more uncomfortable narratives in 20th-century art history: Marinetti, who wrote the Futurist Manifesto (1909) with its celebration of speed, violence, and the destruction of the past, was an enthusiastic early Fascist, and Futurism's aesthetic program (anti-tradition, pro-modernity, glorifying war and machinery) aligned superficially with early Fascist ideology. The Futurists expected to become the official art movement of the Fascist state. Instead: Mussolini's regime ultimately chose Fascist Classicism (monumental, figurative, historicist) over Futurist abstraction as its visual language — the EUR district's rationalist architecture rather than the dynamic abstraction of Balla or Boccioni. The Futurists were left in an uncomfortable position: ideological allies of the regime whose aesthetic program the regime rejected. The Scuola Romana — the group of artists including Mafai and Raphaël who were working in Rome during the same period in a specifically anti-monumental, anti-heroic mode — offered the alternative: intimate domestic subjects, psychological complexity, and a commitment to individual experience that was inherently incompatible with Fascist collectivism. The Cerasi collection's strength in both Futurist and Scuola Romana works makes it the single most complete presentation of this ideological-aesthetic tension in Italian art.