The Lithuanian-born Eva Kuhn Amendola (1880-1961), on whom my discussion will be focused, was a deeply non-conformist woman and a multilingual, cosmopolitan intellectual who became an Italian citizen through her marriage with Giovanni Amendola. The couple met in Rome in 1903, when Kuhn was still a student.
It was at one of the society's meetings in 1903 that she met and became involved with Giovanni Amendola, who was at the time secretary of the society's library, a hub of many cultural initiatives.
"A bear who keeps you in chains": Scenes from a Marriage Giovanni Amendola, around whom so much of Eva Kuhn's life rotates, was born in Naples in 1882.
Initially, Giovanni Amendola and Eva Kuhn shared their passion for Schopenhauer and Theosophy, though Kuhn seems to have had reservations about Theosophy from early on, and she especially disliked its spiritual leader, Annie Besant, who claimed to be a clairvoyant (Vita 46).
In Vita con Giovanni Amendola, however, Kuhn seems to dispute having suffered from mental illness, attributing her condition instead to other, physiological and genetic causes: "Avevo ereditato da mia madre la tendenza a fortissime emicranie con congestioni cerebrali.
By the end of 1914 Futurist activities in Rome became mainly interventionist demonstrations, agitations that Giovanni Amendola decried from the pages of Il Corriere della sera as "disordini provocati dai futuristi." The famous Futurist "vestito antineutrale bianco rosso e verde," created by Balla, was worn by Cangiullo and other Futurists, apparently causing a riot.
(16) Giovanni Amendola was instead decidedly anti-D'Annunzio and deeply despised both the amoral "Vate" and his fans.
Giovanni Amendola and his wife did not exactly have an open marriage, but he had for a time a relationship with the writer and feminist Sibilla Aleramo, while Eva, in 1913 and through 1914, had an intense affair and intellectual exchange with the writer Giovanni Boine, who was seven years younger than she and was a member of the La Voce circle and a collaborator of Papini and Amendola in L'anima (he died from tuberculosis in 1917).
As we can gather from Marinetti's wartime Taccuini, and as confirmed by historian and biographer Gino Agnese in Una vita esplosiva, Marinetti in 1917, when Giovanni Amendola came to visit him in the hospital where he was recovering from a wound, took care swiftly to hide under the mattress a letter signed Magamal (Agnese 186; Marinetti, Taccuini 69).