I t’s incredible how many animals you can observe just by traveling by car, if you know where to look, depending on the environment and the season. Anything that flew, crossed the road or was spotted dead on the asphalt was promptly identified; when we couldn’t, we went by elimination. I remember Andrea bending down to examine the teeth, paw pads or other details of animals like stone martens, polecats and foxes. Or the beaks and the talons on the feathered feet of nocturnal birds of prey, dead by the roadside, which we often stopped to look at with Dad as we drove on the Gargano, between San Severo and San Menaio.
Dad often recalled animals from his youth, long since vanished from our parts, calling them familiarly by their dialect names: the badger was ’a melògna, the stone curlew u néversin, the little bustard u natrone.

There were never any specialist magazines at home, and the only nature documentaries on TV were the black-and-white ones by Folco Quilici and Jacques Cousteau. And yet wildlife always held great interest in our family. Dad never failed to remind us that those animals had always been there, generation after generation, in spite of man and epochal upheavals.
As children, in the evening, in our beds side by side, Andrea and I played “think of an animal” before falling asleep. Taking turns, one thought of an animal and the other had to guess with questions that could only be answered yes or no. Andrea’s knowledge of the subject was extraordinary: he always won, coming up with names like aardvark, echidna, inia (Amazon river dolphin) and many others whose existence I even doubted. While I was hunting for Cordova and Guarneri stickers for my soccer album, he went crazy for a perfectly ordinary swallow for his animal album.

Over the years, on the sixth floor of the house in San Severo, when we were children, there came and went: the dark red-footed falcon (though maybe it was a melanistic kestrel), the buzzard, the western whip snake, the three-toed skink, the grass snake, the mallard, the eel, the partridge, the magpie, the cat, the plum-headed parakeet, and then, again, kestrels, budgies, canaries, thrushes, blackbirds, goldfinches, starlings, chaffinches, hordes of hamsters and hedgehogs, land and water turtles, aquarium fish, guinea pigs and dogs. Andrea brought most of them; some arrived thanks to our father.

When I arrived in Bologna at Andrea’s house on Via Emilia Ponente, he had a gerbil and a goldfish bowl; a hill myna and the Frattas’ Chartreux cat had recently left. The names were always the same: hamsters, hedgehogs and guinea pigs were all Tobia, while falcons, snakes and parrots were invariably called Attila. Andrea had read that hamsters could hibernate and in that state look dead. So when the first hamsters died at home, we didn’t throw them out until the worms appeared.

Our solitary walks around town, in San Severo as in San Benedetto – at a time when we kids enjoyed a freedom unimaginable today – always included a stop at the fish market, where there were also live animals, like mantis shrimp and eels. Once Andrea bought an eel, which splashed around in the bathtub for a couple of days. Today the little square of San Benedetto’s former fish market bears Andrea’s name.

The first time I went to see him on my own in Pescara, at the Jesuit college, Andrea had a small aquarium in his room, with a bed of gravel on the bottom and the plastic wreck of an ancient sunken ship. There were lots of tiny fish with blue reflections. On that occasion he took me around to visit all the pet shops in town. In Bologna, on the other hand, the first time I went to see him he took me first to a reptile show at the bus station, then to see the “flying fox” in a shop opposite the prefecture, and finally the Compianto (Lamentation) by Niccolò dell’Arca at Santa Maria dei Servi, on via Clavature.

In October ’71, for my birthday party, I had invited friends, and above all girls, home to slow-dance. Andrea, then in his third year of high school, arrived from Pescara that evening in the middle of the party. He came into the house through the living-room door straight to where we all were, with his suitcase and a nice package the size of a shoebox, wrapped in white paper with the classic red ribbon bow. After brief greetings, he looked around and said: “This is the present for Michele, but… Maria Chiara will open it!”. She was the prettiest girl in town, a classmate of mine at middle school. She sat on the sofa with the package on her lap, unwrapped it and, quite naturally, not understanding at first what it was or thinking it was fake, pulled out a live western whip snake!
Naturally a scream followed, and Maria Chiara threw everything to the floor and ran off. The snake, which we naturally called Attila, was a meter and five centimeters long and stayed in the living room for more than a year, in an aquarium tank covered with a volume of the encyclopedia Conoscere. He often managed to escape, though, by pushing the book aside, and we’d find him climbing at the top of the big ficus that reached the ceiling. At first we enjoyed taking him around town in a wicker fishing basket, and he came in handy for clearing people off the most coveted benches in the Villa Comunale park. One day, during one of the usual walks I took him on in the dead-end alley next to our building, Attila slipped into a crack in the door of the medicine storeroom of the pharmacy nearby. I tried to pull him out, but he was already halfway in, and for fear of breaking him I let go. He disappeared inside and I had to go into the pharmacy and explain. We found him climbing high up on a shelf.
At that time Andrea had a yellow Moto Guzzi Dingo Cross, kept in the public garage near our house. I, not yet fourteen, could use it during the week while Andrea was in Pescara, on condition that I looked after Attila and relieved him of any chores concerning the moped. This also meant that I was the one who had to ask Mom for the money to pay for the garage every month.
At the time I had no idea how to feed a snake: I tried with meat that I put in the tank, but it just lay there rotting. So I began forcing the snake’s mouth open to stuff in little pieces of meat, pushing them in as far as I could with a finger. Nothing could have been more wrong, and yet Attila survived. Once the early period of fun with the snake was over, I began to get tired of it and decided to get rid of it, handing it over to the garage owner in exchange for a few months’ rent.

The plum-headed parakeet was also called Attila. Bought in Pescara, it went to San Severo and then back to Pescara. When Andrea came back to San Menaio that summer, after a few days I asked what had become of Attila. Andrea went white: he had forgotten the parrot in his room in Pescara. For days he felt really bad, often asking me – for comfort – whether I thought it was dead by now. I dare not imagine what Andrea found, and felt, when he went back to Pescara months later.”