Galli was killed by police in 1904 during disturbances connected with a general strike in Milan. Soon after publication of Marinetti’s manifesto, a small group of anarchist Divisionist painters who had studied with Giacomo Balla joined the movement. Futurist artists put the Milanese cityscape on canvas. In contrast to the staleness of such venerable cities as Venice, Florence or Rome, Milan - according to Marinetti - was a place inhabited by ‘the divine’. The urban experience is crucial to all Futurist manifestos. City life, it was argued, confronts man with modernity. This confrontation compels him to adept intellectually and emotionally. Balla’s depictions of the dynamic nature of motion encapsulated Futurist ideals and his 1909 oil painting ‘Street light’ is one of the iconic images associated with the movement. Balla taught many of the younger Futurists, including Umberto Boccioni. The latter had started his career as a sign painter. In 1902 he moved to Paris and his early work shows the influence of French Impressionism. Born in Reggio Calabria, Boccioni would make his career in Milan where he had settled in 1908. He soon joined the Futurist bandwagon. The theory that speeding cars and steaming trains represent the motion of modern life was widely accepted. Initially, Futurist painting lacked a suitable contemporary language to articulate the new subject matter. Boccioni was aware of this failure and searched for a dynamic style that would reflect the urban environment. In ‘La città che sale’ (The city rises, 1910), he went out his way to grasp the vitality of the metropolis. Against the Milanese background of smoking chimneys and scaffolding, he painted a streetcar and a locomotive, as well as some enormous horses tugging at their harnesses. Yet the pictorial means of realizing this veneration of steam and activity are as anachronistic as the prominent role given to horse power in this context. Boccioni still applied the established Impressionist techniques. The formation of the Futurist painters’ group in 1910 was followed by a major touring exhibition which started at the Berheim Jeune gallery in Paris in February 1912 and then, after its London showing in March, moved on to Berlin, Brussels and other European cities. Whilst in London, the exhibition was shown at the