ABSTRACT
As long ago as 1913 we find Marinetti observing that
An ordinary man can in a day's time travel by train from a little dead town of empty squares, where the sun, the dust and the wind amuse themselves in silence, to a capital city bristling with lights, gestures and street cries. By reading a newspaper the inhabitant of a mountain village can tremble each day with anxiety, following insurrection in China [and] the heroic dog-sleds of the polar explorers. The timid, sedentary inhabitant of any provincial town can indulge in the intoxication of danger by going to the cinema and watching a great hunt in the Congo … Then back in his bourgeois bed he can enjoy the distant expressive voice of a Caruso or Burzio. 1
