As a capstone to its coming show “Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe,” the Guggenheim Museum has managed a rare coup: securing the first loan of five major Futurist murals from the central post office in Palermo, Sicily, where they have hung since being commissioned for the space in the 1930s.

These rarely seen murals, which have adorned a conference room for decades, are both figurative and abstract, cast in shades of blue, with fluid and straight lines that play with perspective. They were painted in 1933 and 1934 by an artist, Benedetta Cappa, who went by only her first name. She was married to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the poet who founded the Futurist movement in 1909 with a manifesto that rejected the past and called for an aggressive push toward the future.

Called “Synthesis of Communications,” the murals depict communication by air, radio, sea, land, telegraph and telephone. But they also convey the complexity of the Futurist vision. Even as the Futurists sought to free themselves of the burden of history and propel Italy into the future, they also drew on a concept they called “primordio,” or a return to Italy’s origins. For that reason, the murals were designed to evoke the frescoes of ancient Pompeii.

A key strain of European Modernism, Futurism began in Italy as a literary movement in the years leading up to World War I, a time of rapid economic growth and political turmoil. Futurist artists often depicted images of industry, speed and machinery. The movement quickly evolved to have broader political ambitions, some later linked to those of the Italian Fascist party. The murals were commissioned during the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, who set about modernizing Italy.