ABSTRACT
To understand what was distinctive about the Fin De Siècle in Italy, one must begin with the larger post-Risorgimento context as well as the particular character of élite culture as it emerged in nineteenth-century Italy, partly prior to and then very much in response to that context. This chapter describes Mario Morasso's intellectual itinerary, and presents some brief comparisons between Morasso's public posture and the avant-garde stance that Marinetti will adopt in 1909. Morasso and Marinetti developed specific myths that might advance their images of modernity, il Wattman and futurism itself. Modernism was born out of a deep sense of crisis in the narrative of historical progress dominant within nineteenth-century European culture. The postmodernists no longer register the modernist sense that experimentation might actually lead beyond a world governed solely by power. Morasso's work suggests that there were forebodings of postmodernism in the Fin De Siècle period and, perhaps then too, as a subterranean current within modernism itself.
