Poetry
While Marinetti perhaps initially had intentions of following a legal career, his passion was for literature and poetry. Early on he had published a literary magazine between 1892 and 1894, while still at the Jesuit college, and in 1898 he published his first work in the new 'free verse' style. By 1900 he had decided to devote himself entirely to Italian and French literature and poetry. He founded the international magazine Poesia (Poetry) in 1905 and published it in Milan from 1905 until 1909. Marinetti was on a personal crusade to liberate poetry and literature from the constraints of traditional punctuation and syntax and, from the very beginning, he used Poesia to launch the idea of verso libero (free verse). Poesia ran from 1905 until 1909 by which time the style and layout had become outmoded.
Poetry
Marinetti's early works of literature, such as his experimental novel Marfarka le futuriste of 1911, often got him into trouble - indeed he was arrested and charged with publishing pornography when Marfarka was released on an unsuspecting public. In literature, following on from his early experiments with 'free verse', he introduced the concept of 'free words', eschewing syntax and punctuation while revolutionizing typography. In 1912 Marinetti published his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature in which he urged writers to "banish punctuation, as well as adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions." Verso libero gradually evolved into parole in libertà (words-in-freedom) the purpose of which Marinetti outlined in his manifesto Destruction of Syntax - Imagination without Strings - Words-in-Freedom of 1913.
Poetry
The other 'modern' way the Futurists publicized themselves and their movement was the serata. These Futurist soirées, invariably organized and led by Marinetti, were the precursor of the 'Synthetic Theatre'. Performances usually included music or a performance of Russolo's intonorumori or noise machines, improvised speeches, presentations of paintings, literary and poetic readings and short dramatic plays called sintesi or syntheses.
In 1917 Marinetti met Benedetta Cappa, twenty one years his junior and a student of Giacomo Balla. By 1919 - the year he wrote his manifesto Against Marriage - they were living together and they married in 1923. He died Dec. 2, 1944 in Bellagio, Italy.