Italian Futurism Zang Tumb Tumb Shirt – Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Zang Tumb Tumb is an artist’s book by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian poet and founder of Futurism. It is a cornerstone of sound poetry and concrete poetry for which it became and remained a point of reference. It is an account of the battle of Adrianople fought during the First Balkan War between 1912 and 1913.

To create the work, Marinetti used the “parole in libertà” words in freedom, a futurist writing technique he invented in which there are no significant periods. Also used are mathematical signs, musical symbols, compound words, verbs in the infinitive, and typographic characters of variable sizes alternating between bold, italic, block letters, and capital letters to create a visual effect. Adverbs and adjectives are abolished, and analogies between words are sought.

Zang Tum Tumb is a masterpiece of world literature of all time. It is today considered a seminal work of modernist art that enormously influenced the development of the avant-garde.

Excerpts from the work were published in various magazines between 1912 and 1914 before the publication of the complete book by Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia of Milan. The Taveggia typography of Milan printed the book, and the typographical innovations were entrusted to the typographer Cesare Cavanna of Milan.

The book’s cover is a work of visual art in itself, so we have decided to reproduce it on this shirt printed on both the front and the back.

We print this T-Shirt to order on high-quality garments using world-class Direct to Garment (DTG) printers.