ABSTRACT
The crucial role played by the literary journals that crowd the twentieth century in renewing Italian culture has long been recognized by a critical tradition at least to Augusto Hermet's 1941 volume La ventura delle riviste. From Benedetto Croce's La critica and Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini's Leonardo, both founded in 1903, to Prezzolini's next venture of La Voce, the cultural periodical becomes the laboratory of modernity, the privileged site of intellectual exchange where writers, artists, critics, and philosophers meet to test out new theoretical horizons. Thus, the enquete launched with much fanfare by F. T. Marinetti to turn Poesia into the ground of exchange between Italian and French poets in fact demonstrated all the problematic implications of the liminal position of its editor between the two literary traditions. His opportunity to attempt a wide-ranging assessment of contemporary Italian literature occurred in 1899, when he wrote two articles on Italian poetry and prose for the prestigious symbolist journal La Vogue.
