The Aeropaintress and her Swift Messengers

The poet Luciano Folgore (Lucian Lightningbolt) was forced to adopt his pen name: the poor man was born Omero Vecchi (Homer Oldfellow), a name redolent with echoes of some manifesto of Pastism, a supreme disgrace and pure anathema for a Futurist like him. Much luckier in the name department was the painter Benedetta Cappa, whose surname could refer, variously, in her native Italian, to either a smoky chimney hood, a fluttering cape, or the admantine, exotic name (deriving as it did from the ultramarine lands of the Aegean) of a consonant, the letter K, or Greek kappa. Sure enough, the Futurist Marinetti chose to marry that blessed (for such is the meaning of Benedetta) poetess, encouraged by her energetic and dynamic surname. The Futurist playwright and poet Paolo Buzzi referred to her “winged and finned machinery” and described her as a “beautiful abandoner of systems.” Anna Maria Ruta reintroduces her to us in this article, as someone who did not so much abandon systems as reformulate them, reconciling, in her extraordinary visions, the dynamism of Futurism with a wholly Mediterranean lyricism. Luciano Romano’s photography captures the five canvases that Benedetta Cappa painted for the Palermo Post Office building, a place that demands our renewed and appreciative gaze.