Ardengo Soffici

On returning to Italy in 1907, Soffici settled in Poggio a Caiano in the countryside near Florence (where he lived for the rest of his life) and wrote articles on modern artists for the first issue of the political and cultural magazine La Voce.

The leading Futurists Marinetti, Boccioni and Carrà, were so incensed by this that they immediately boarded a train for Florence and assaulted Soffici and his La Voce colleagues at the Caffè Giubbe Rosse.

After these diplomatic overtures, Soffici, together with Giovanni Papini, Aldo Palazzeschi and Italo Tavolato withdrew from La Voce in 1913 to form a new periodical, Lacerba, which would concentrate entirely on art and culture.

In 1914, personal quarrels and artistic differences between the Milan Futurists and the Florence group around Soffici, Papini and Carlo Carrà, created a rift in Italian Futurism.

Soffici created a distance from Futurism and, discovering a new reverence for Tuscan tradition, became associated with the "return to order" which manifested itself in the naturalistic landscapes which thereafter dominated his work.

[citation needed] At the end of the Second World War, Soffici was taken as a British POW and was imprisoned for several months in unhealthy conditions at an allied prison camp where he contracted pneumonia.

Later, once released due to lack of evidence, he returned home and lived in Poggio a Caiano and spent his summers in Forte dei Marmi.