First published in FOOL magazine in 2015 and republished by Kitchen Table Magazine in 2019.
The table is laid with crystal wine goblets and psychedelic ceramics on beaten tin “tablecloths.” The table (if you could call it that) is arranged to resemble an airplane with bread loaves molded to match. The room is decorated with carved potato sculptures, kaleidoscopic lighting, ambrosial and jarring perfumes, modernist frescoes that translate the frenetic energy of jazz into color…
No this is not the famed food symphony, El Sonmi, of the Roca brothers or the tokenly shocking design of the latest Shanghai concept restaurant. This is a Futurist feast in early 1930s Torino, Italy’s then artistic and cultural hub.
The Italian Futurists are known for their subversion of tradition in all aspects of life; it is well documented in their numerous manifestos on everything from sculpture to theater, music to cuisine. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the leader of the Futurist movement, founded his boys club to re-engineer daily life and embody their sacred ideals of speed, synchronicity and dynamism so that their lives took on a multi-mediated quality where art and reality, object and subject fused into one seamless, Lynchian performance.
But what has gone overlooked for nearly a century is their foray into cocktails before mixology even existed. Unlike today’s cocktail fad, the Futurist approach to mixed drinks was not some high brow effort to refine Italian bar culture, but rather an attempt to elevate popular tradition to the status of art, and consumption to an aesthetic embodiment of national pride.
The Futurists eschewed everything non-Italian in their gastronomy, going so far as to ban anglicisms (bar became ber or quisibeve: “here you drink”). Polibibite (plural) was the name the Futurists chose for these ground breaking mixed drinks because it set their cocktails apart from the simple one or two ingredient concoctions of that time.
Poli, from ancient Greek, means many, and bibita is drink; polibibita (singular) suggests many drinks in one. This refers not only to the many liqueurs required to make a polibibita, but also to the fact that these cocktails were meant to evolve in the glass.
Marinetti’s own Inventina for example used cubes of frozen orange juice so the citrus gradually infused the drink as the ice melted. Rather a cliché confined to tiki bars or suburban garden parties today but truly revolutionary in the thirties, especially considering that these Futurists were not trained barmen, but merely avid drinkers.
These cocktails accompanied their wild fêtes, more like performance art pieces than the pop-up dinners we are familiar with today. Multicolored lights and music accompanied each course to excite the appetite, which was then turned on its head through the inversion of courses running from sweet to “demolition,” or deconstructed anitpasti.
Both cocktails and cuisine broke sharply from the tried and trusted sweet-sour or sweet-bitter combinations to challenge the gastronome with spice or saccharine savoriness. Above all, the tactile quality of Futurist feasts cast the diner as an actor in this Bacchanalian production.
Most everything was served without cutlery, encouraging the childlike fun of eating with your hands. Sculptured dishes were communally picked apart in a hedonistic feeding frenzy. Silver platters served the double purpose of cymbals, and the dinner party soon devolved into a veritable orchestra.
To eat a Futurist meal was to galvanize each of the senses with an insouciant zeal for life. More innovative still was their knowledge of the chemical composition of drinks and from this, their classification of polibibite by the occasion or action to be pursued post-consumption.
The Snebbianti (Foglifter) class of cocktails were composed of powerful spirits to diffuse weighty morals and awaken the id (mind you, this was the heyday of psychoanalysis) while the Guerra in Letto (War in Bed) were aphrodisiacs meant to seduce the drinker to bed with the jingoist drive of reproducing a new and thoroughly modern Italian people.
One such Guerra was Cinzio Barosi’s Il Regeneratore: a deconstruction of the Piedmontese classic zabaglione made with egg, Asti spumante, walnuts, sugar and finished with an overtly phallic banana protruding from the glass. Perhaps to lubricate the feminine public before introducing their radical convictions, they included warnings in their dinner invitations for this particular polibibita: “The presence of ladies of spirit is requested.”
All Futurist activities were tinged with this chauvinistic, yet anarchic nationalism. Il Regeneratore, “the regenerator,” was meant to do exactly what the name implies: to invigorate the virile male with its high potassium and magnesium content, both proven energy boosters.
Artist Paolo Saladin’s Saltoincarne (Carnaleap) was even more irreverent. It was a tri-continental mélange of stimulating herbs like coca, damiana, and yohimbe to aid the sleepless hero, based on Marinetti’s theatrical protagonist Mafarka the Futurist, in his unending copulative conquests. This overt masculine sexuality was symbolic of the Futurist’s larger project: a warlike penetration of their modernist ideas into the passive, effete, womanly world of intellectual and national diehardism.
But the Futurist movement was full of contradictions, and the polibibite were not spared. The Avanvera, the liquid-cuisine cocktail, glorified Italy’s “place in the Sun” through its colonial accoutrements. Though the drink itself contains Italian liquors, it is garnished with banana, and served on a tin platter surrounded by imperialist symbols like coffee beans and almonds, alongside Italian staples like Parmesan, cured anchovy and slices of tomato. The drinker was meant to mix and match these bites with alternate sips to explore harmonious and discordant pairings in much the same way that mixologists strive to match cocktails with food today.
While the Avanvera hints at a progressive cultural fusion (still quite rare in Italy today), another polibibita, the Decisone (again by Marinetti) uses rum. Obviously, the Futurists’ xenophobic patriotism had its limits.
In each sip of a polibibita, the drinker was meant to “recall distant places, an amorous passion, and a trip to foreign lands,” but via uniquely Italian products. Even the Giostra d’alcol, quintessentially Italian with its Barbera wine and bitters, nods to the exotic with its chocolate garnish.
Still, the Futurists believed that cocktails in Italy should be Italian. They were unwavering on this point. Their dogmatism was rebellious in a time when the bourgeois home bar, stocked with French or English products, was all the rage.
Amidst an aspiring cosmopolitan society that fetishized all things international, the Futurists argued for a reimagination of the cocktail through Italian liquors beyond the standard vermouth or Campari. But as a fringe subculture composed of what the larger public considered to be radical weirdos, their impact was rather limited.
On the one hand, the Futurists sanctified all things Italian and abandoned any foreign foods and drinks they felt had no place in the creation of Italy’s future. On the other, they rebelled against deep-seated Italian traditions like pasta, which they aspired to abolish as an “absurd Italian gastronomic religion.”
For this reason, and many others, the Futurists’ cuisine and cocktails never really caught on with Italian society. Their approach was too extremist, their palates too untamed. They were outsiders in their own country, trying to unify an “Italian” identity through a gastronomy dedicated to elevating everyday ingestion to “the art of self-nourishment.”
This snobbish aestheticism didn’t appeal to everyone. Those who did attend Futurist dinners were already in the cult of speed and simultaneity; an elite crew of modernity-mongers who had little in common with the average Italian under Fascism.
The polibibite were the Futurists’ flippant response to the moral, economic, and political chaos of their time. Like all neophilic “foodies,” they could be accused of a gastronomic elitism that subjugated politics to aesthetics. But these drinks touched more than the tongue and challenged more than tradition.
Marinetti believed that enjoying the pleasures of the table was integral to our humanity. Cuisine, after all, is what sets us apart from animals. Food and drink transforms the body, but it also constructs identity. By eating or refusing to eat certain foods, we align ourselves with social or national groups so by ingesting these thoroughly Italian libations, the Futurists embodied and performed Italianness at a time when this national identity was still in flux.
As the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach wrote, “man thinks, acts, and dreams according to what he eats and drinks.”
Through these mixed drinks, the Futurists hoped to embody a progressive Italian identity totally apart from Mussolini’s anachronistic and autarkic vision for Italy. The Futurists were also the very first to dignify cocktail culture with the solemnity of art and to this, we should raise a glass…in Marinetti’s own words, “Cin cin e zang tumb tumb!”
