A t ten it was very easy for me to persuade my father to buy me a little air rifle (Uncle Mario would soon give us his own). Once at the gun shop of Nardino Tartaglia, a friend of Dad’s, it didn’t take much for Nardino to persuade my father to buy me, instead of an air rifle, a small Flobert, which was still a firearm.
For Andrea, on the other hand, getting a moped at fourteen was a battle, while I, at twelve, was already riding one without hiding from my parents.
In those years, I remember, Andrea couldn’t bear even the slightest scene of violence or fear in the black-and-white prime-time films on TV, which at most showed Hitchcock movies. He’d cover his eyes with his hands and, if necessary, run out of the room so as not to hear even the sound. Then, from behind the door, he’d ask: “Is it over?”, amid general teasing.
From that period I also treasure the memory of the countless times Andrea had me, as his only audience – later joined by Mariella – watch his “little sketches”. We’d shut ourselves in our room, I’d lie silently on the bed and he, in the space between the bed and the wardrobe, would begin acting out the fantastic adventures of his favorite characters: Carmelo Dormipure and Mr. Scarpa (a surname taken from the neighbors of our aunt and uncle in Vicenza). It was a whirl of words and gestures. Andrea leapt from one side to the other playing several characters at once, changing his voice and sweating buckets.
The plots were gripping, in a continuous crescendo of ever more tangled events, until they became impossible to unravel. And in fact the “little sketches” always ended without a real conclusion, sometimes because Andrea was exhausted, other times thanks to Mom’s providential call to dinner.
At thirteen and a half, my parents enrolled Andrea in the first year of the renowned “Armando Misticoni” art high school in Pescara, lodging him with the Jesuits. It was an enormous sacrifice for them, both emotional – given Andrea’s character – and financial, since at the time Mom wasn’t teaching yet.
Back then the highway was under construction and the car journey to Pescara was long and tiring: you took the state road, tackling the notorious climbs of Ortona, where trucks forced a snail’s pace, and crossing every town along the way was slow too.

For Andrea, who on weekends came home by train or went to our grandparents in San Benedetto, the train journey wasn’t easy either: Pescara’s big old railway station didn’t even have underpasses, and sometimes to reach the platform you had to cross other stationary trains, getting on through one door and off through the other. I still remember the old steam locomotives busy shunting the cars.
Because of all these difficulties, at the end of the first year my parents resigned themselves to enrolling Andrea for his second year at the “Kennedy” school in Foggia, closer, just thirty kilometers from San Severo.
It was during that year of commuting, spent in San Severo, that Andrea began a radical change in his way of being, quickly making up for all the lost time, amid fights, unorthodox pranks and first romantic conquests. A change that would culminate the following year, when Andrea wanted to go back to Pescara with a completely new determination.”