Interview at the Caffè Greco

Transcript of a report by Vincenzo Mollica from Speciale TG1 RAI (1983)

For Andrea Pazienza, the Caffè Greco is probably an unusual place. Generally, you’d expect to find him somewhere young, like a disco, or a youth hangout, as they’re called these days. Instead, at the Caffè Greco… Why…

Why?
To have breakfast.

To have breakfast. Simply for that… Listen, you don’t come here to rediscover origins, roots with painters who may have been congenial to you?
No

Absolutely not?
Absolutely not.

So the rhetoric of De Chirico, of Savinio, those things, doesn’t interest you at all.
It interests me a lot, but it’s not likely to make me choose one bar over another.

Zanardi, published by the magazine Frigidaire, has also become a symbol, a precise point of reference.
There’s a dominant trait, though: nastiness. Zanardi is nasty.
Zanardi is as nasty as a RAI antenna can be, I mean he repeats, repeats… He’s a repeater, he reflects what’s around him, what surrounds him and what can somehow move him. Being moved isn’t always positive. Zanardi is capable of being moved.

Pazienza, but after all, what are comics to you?
They’re something that at the moment is getting very close to literature, and I don’t know if literature means anything more than comics on the scale of values – assuming there is one – but certainly the more you try and manage to be evocative… For me, the fundamental thing is to evoke. If, reading a story, your heart manages in the end to beat once more or once less, and the adrenaline flows for a moment more or less quickly, and the glands secrete one fluid instead of another, and something in the reader changes, then I’ve achieved my goal, regardless of the final moral, of whether someone closes the story and says: I liked it, I didn’t like it. I need much less than that.