The most memorable event in my years of friendship with the Futurists was a performance we saw together at the Milan puppet theatre of The Chinese Pirates, a ‘drama in three acts’. The theatre itself was puppet-sized. An invisible orchestra, clarinet, piano, violin, bass, played an overture and bits of incidental music. There were tiny windows on either side of the tiny stage. In the last act we heard singing and were terrified to see that it came from giants standing behind these windows – the pirates. They were normal-statured people, of course, but we were accustomed to the puppet scale.