Le Roi Bombance: The original Futurist Cookbook?

The themes of nutrition and digestion fascinated Filippo Tommaso Marinetti for much of his career. The beginnings of this interest can be traced to his pre-Futurist play Le Roi Bombance, published in 1905, in which the eponymous obese king is concerned only with satisfying his enormous appetite. Marinetti’s most famous discussion of gastronomy and gastronomic habits came in 1932 with the publication of La cucina futurista, which was a development of the Manifesto della cucina futurista launched two years previously. Although Le Roi Bombance and La cucina futurista were born out of very different cultural and historical periods, I wish to suggest that a continuum of ideas exists between them, specifically with regard to the relationship between eating and creativity and between eating and identity.