Francesco Cangiullo, Poesia pentagrammata (Poetry on the Staff), 1923.
Cover by Enrico Prampolini.

With this book, Francesco Cangiullo once again anticipated another important movement of modern art: sonorous poetry. In fact, the author's intention was to "give tempo to noises and onomatopoeic sounds." Cangiullo wrote down his verses on a staff, as if they were musical notes instead of words. As musicians use notes of different types to mean different lengths of sounds, Cangiullo used words of different shapes and size, in order to render the different degrees of a poetic declamation. The cover, by Enrico Prampolini, is perfectly attuned to the author's theory.