As a child Andrea may have followed our father hunting no more than a couple of times, together with me. Getting up very early in the morning and staying still for more than a minute without fooling around wasn’t for him, and he realized it right away. What’s more, blood terrified him. He never had a gun license, never had a weapon registered in his name, and never went to a shooting range. “In hunting mode” he may have fired a real rifle no more than five times, in Gadescia, one afternoon in ’75 – and I couldn’t say for sure whether he hit a bird.
At home in San Severo, no hunting or weapons magazines or materials ever appeared, apart from Dad’s two volumes of the Sadea-Sansoni Encyclopedia of Hunting, 1967 edition. Even in Bologna, on via Emilia, where – following me – my grandfather’s Flobert and 16-gauge double-barreled shotgun ended up chained to a rack in my room, I don’t remember ever seeing publications on the subject, except for a fleeting appearance of the manual Tac Armi, from which he drew information for the story “Armi” published in Alter Alter.

In reality Andrea understood nothing about hunting and weapons, but he was certainly attracted to them. From ’77, or maybe even earlier, until the end, he kept on his desk a lightweight plastic replica of a big black revolver, which he drew several times. Even in Montepulciano, his “boar hunts” with bow and crossbow were little more than walks around the house at noon, interrupted by the call to lunch from the window. The only animal he killed with the crossbow was a porcupine, already dying after being hit by a car in front of the house, which he finished off.

I think the only real hunting attempt was a night-time wait for boar, at Manonera, with bow and crossbow. The time I abandoned him up a tree.

In his works, after all, Andrea always took a critical stance toward hunting, as in “Caccia e Fresca” and “Una Estate”, or in his participation in the campaign for the referendum against hunting. And let’s not forget his collaboration with Lega per l’Ambiente, Goletta Verde, etc.

He was, on the other hand, a formidable swimmer and loved diving with a mask. It was he who bought, from Novelli in San Benedetto, the first Miniministen, a small underwater speargun. Shortly after, he came back from Pescara with a Vicojet De Luxe – the underwater cannon used by James Bond in a film of the time – with which, firing dry in the studio in San Severo, Andrea and I managed to pierce two phone books and stick the heavy shaft into the wall behind. After losing these two spearguns, Andrea then bought a better-balanced Medisten, which I still have today.
Back home from a short stay on the Tremiti islands, where he had taken the speargun with him, Andrea told me he had eaten for free at the local restaurant “’A furmicula” because he had drawn its poster, and that he had caught an enormous octopus, so big that he had taken it to the restaurant and made them put it on the menu.

That he drew the restaurant’s logo is true, that he caught an octopus is possible – and it would be one of only two he caught in his life – but that the octopus was as big as he claimed, I doubt.
In fact, over time I was the one who mostly used all these gadgets, while Andrea only watched them, to capture their essence and transfer it into some work of his. He was, however, an excellent and passionate razor-clam fisherman and a skilled skier and skater.

As for kendo, it’s unthinkable that Andrea could have devoted himself in his life to a martial art, which, like any other, requires concentration, discipline and perseverance. He came back from Alcatraz to via Emilia with six pieces: two short wooden swords (rosewood, he told me), two long ones and two made of bamboo slats, assembled with a leather grip. Later, on via San Bartolomeo in Montepulciano, the armor and helmet arrived. I went to Alcatraz once myself, but there was no kendo, and no talk of it. I doubt Andrea devoted more than five hours of his life to fooling around and having his photo taken with his kendo-master friend at Alcatraz. And yet he had understood everything about kendo: one sniff was enough for him to grasp the essence of things.
One of the long wooden swords, with a Zanardi carved on it, still hangs on my bookcase, under his bow and crossbow, next to a long aluminum ruler of his and the racket from Una estate.

The same goes for the gym. When I arrived in Bologna in ’77, Andrea told me he had recently started going to Gigi Lodi’s gym, but after that day he never went again. It’s true, though, that since he was a boy he kept exercise equipment at home and used it regularly, for a few days before every summer.

Andrea was, after all, a natural athlete.”