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F. C. Coletti, "Portrait of F. T. Marinetti" (no date)

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As the first Italian-born movement since the Renaissance to leave its mark on the international artworld, Futurism energized, and antagonized, an entire era. Seeking to liberate Italy from its role as Europe’s cultural cemetery — a storehouse of quaint relics, an open-air museum for the ages — the poet, publisher, and impresario Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proposed a ruthless purge of his nation’s aesthetic and ideological sentimentalisms. The declared enemy of all things passéist, Marinetti reviled any and all wistful reminiscences.

Quite in spite of himself, however, Marinetti waxed nostalgic when it came to the city of Milan. He settled there in 1898, founded the journal Poesia, and laid the groundwork for the tireless agitation that would occupy him for four straight decades — from the dawn of Futurism to the last gasps of the Fascist regime. "I feel myself bound to Milan’s forest of chimneys and its ancient cathedral," he would write years after the fire of Futurism had smoldered down to nearly irrelevant embers. "The great traditional and Futurist Milan, whose mechanized feelings, ideas, and thinking machines I am about to aeropoetically praise, is forever the central power plant of the energies and optimism of Italy." At the dawn of the 20th century in Italy, Milan stood as the sole Italian city worthy of such mechanized metaphorics. Though the "Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" appeared on the front page of Paris’s Le Figaro on February 20, 1909, it was born — as Marinetti writes in its feverish proem — in a factory ditch near "the flooding Po," where the author crashed his speeding roadster smack into modernity.

To the extent that Futurism has been, for better or worse, conflated with Marinetti, his fraught cultural bequest remains, in turn, inextricable from Milan. Dubbing himself "The Caffeine of Europe," Marinetti argued that it was only from the Lombard capital that Italians could usher in a new aesthetic and political order. As the epicenter of the nation’s industry and capital, Milan also stood as the only major metropolis free from the sclerotic hold of Italy’s archaeological and pedagogical past. Milan’s unrivaled technological infrastructure and relative lack of artifacts made it the ideal site on which to raze Italian culture to a tabula rasa.

But today, the "caffeine of Europe" increasingly means Starbucks rather than Marinetti. One hundred years after the launching of Futurism, with Italy a leader in technology and industry, rather than a charming backwater, to what extent can we trace the lingering influences of Futurism in Italy’s contemporary aesthetics? Does Milan still hold a particular purchase on the art scene in Italy? In a literal sense, that purchase is indisputable. Milanese finance, and the extensive gallery system that it anchors, fuel an art scene that first emerged from the Accademia di Brera in the 19th century. The city’s role as Europe’s fashion capital contributes to its air of aesthetic innovation, as does its prominent role in Italy’s design industry, reaffirmed each year at Milan Design Week. The recent establishment of the Bovisa Triennale Center, a Prada Foundation exhibition space, and a host of other innovative galleries and venues, have cemented the city’s reputation as a thriving site of contemporary production. The Pavilion of Contemporary Art now houses a dynamic collection of works, and the Museum of the 20th Century is slated to open on the Piazza del Duomo this month, in time for the centenary of Futurism’s founding (and fittingly so, as it was Marinetti and his cohorts who first agitated for such a museum in the 1930s). High-profile architects currently involved in reshaping both downtown and the industrial periphery include Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Massimiliano Fuksas, and Daniel Liebeskind. A large number of the country’s aspiring artists have set up studios in Milan, while many of its most notable figures remain based here, including Francesco Vezzoli, Roberto Cuoghi, Alice Cattaneo, Massimo Grimaldi, Yervant Gianikian, and Angela Ricci Lucchi, to name only a few.