My hope for Italian literature is that sooner or later it may come from the ‘popolo,’ and that it may come uncorrupted by the kind of education at present in vogue, and corrupted as little as possible by any education at all save that in life itself, which the ‘popolo’ already possesses. If such a revolution in literature ever does take place, it will be like that in the Middle Ages when writers forsook Latin for the vernacular. Nor does it seem to me improbable. The condition of the labouring class is considerably better than before the war; a little leisure may presently be achieved. And at the same time the old education is weakening, growing decrepit. Professors are dying out, or at any rate becoming scarcer, since their salaries are not high enough to support life in the social condition to which they are condemned. By its stiffening of standards the Riforma Gentile results in cutting down drastically the number of young men who can attend a university. And the salaries of teachers in the elementary schools are so inadequate to the present cost of living that the ranks must be filled from among the ‘popolo.’ Since the war the pace of life itself is swifter and fiercer than ever, while literature grows weaker, more anaemic. Presently the water will rise too high; surplus life will be too strong; with a rush it will flow over and submerge the old literature with a new rich wave. It would be unfair not to add that for years the desire for such a renovation has been cherished by many Italians. What else but a reaction against the debility of Italian literature was, and still is, the whole Futurist movement? Consciously it was, among other things, a passionate protest against verbosity, rhetoric and sentimentalism; less consciously perhaps, with its demand for velocity, a protest against the separation of literature from life. And, though Futurism has not itself created any work of importance, it has had an important influence on Italian writers, an influence which perhaps did more than any other to overcome that of D’Annunzio. Even to-day Futurism is still to be reckoned with. But it, too, is a conscious movement, and thus tends, as Marinetti himself half admits, to become academic, to crystalline in the forms with which it reacted against other forms.