As usual we spent the night in our favorite café, which is attended by the most elegant women. Some one suggested that we take an automobile ride in the suburbs. We whirled over the sleepy streets. Out of town. Deep darkness.... Moment of falling. We are hurled into an abyss. Ecstasy.... Then--we are on the bottom of a ditch filled with malodorous dregs. We drown in the mud. Mud covers the face, the body, mud blinds the eyes, fills the mouth. Finally we succeed in getting out of the filthy ditch and we go back to the city. But.... For a certain time there remained with us the taste of rottenness; we could not get rid of the rotten odor that permeated all pores of our bodies. In the moment of falling into that ditch the idea of Futurism came into my head. On the same night before dawn we wrote the entire first manifesto on Futurism. Thus the new art was born under peculiar circumstances--"under the sign of scandal"--and scandal became the tactics of Italian Futurists who have professed their "delight in being hissed" and their contempt for applause. A few points of that manifesto: We shall sing of the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness. Literature has hitherto glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy of sleep; we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff. There is no more beauty except in strife. We wish to glorify war--the only purifier of the world--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beauty of Ideas that kill, the contempt for women. We wish to destroy the museums, the libraries, to fight against moralism and feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian meannesses. This bombastic program has been heralded by the Italian Futurists ever since 1909. Fortunately they went no further than threats, but they strove to attract attention and in this they gloriously succeeded. Their attitude toward women was expressed in the motto: "Méprisez la femme." Love for woman is an atavism and should be discarded into archives. We chant hymns to the new beauty that has come into the world in our days, a hymn to swiftness, a doxology to motion. Woman is justified in her existence inasmuch as she is a prostitute. Sensuality for the sake of sensuality is extolled as the only stimulus in human life,--its only aim. Otherwise human beings are of no importance, at best as important as inanimate objects. The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp, which, with spasmodic starts, shrieks out the most heart-rending expressions of color.