ABSTRACT
One of the most fascinating aspects of Italian Futurism is precisely the disenchanted contamination of disparate literary ingredients with the explicit intention of exposing and distorting their cultural matrices. If Christian morality had protected humanity against the excesses of sensuality, ‘Futurist morality will protect man against the inevitable decay produced by slowness, memory, analysis, rest, and habit’. The homage to Lombroso is suggestive of the positivist eye through which the Futurists were acknowledging the existence of ‘ghosts’. The futurist ghosts evoked are ‘electric’ in the way in which electricity revealed a new way to explore and embody the Unknown. If ‘ghostly’, in the Gothic, Romantic and then Decadent sense of ‘spectral’, as a quality that might instil fear, terror, disgust and occasionally consolatory longing in a sympathetic reader, does not seem immediately pertinent to the poetic temper of the Futurist movement, ‘ghosts’ are.
