Andrea Pazienza’s artistic talent manifested itself at a very young age, and recognition quickly followed. The first recognition that we have record of was achieved in Grottammare, when he was just fourteen years old. He was awarded a painting prize reserved for those under fifteen. This initial success was followed by more victories, participation with his paintings in collective exhibitions, and at the age of seventeen, in December 1973, his first solo exhibition. It was hosted at the Guglielmi Art Gallery in San Benedetto del Tronto, the town where he was born on May 23, 1956. At the time, Pazienza was attending an art high school in Pescara, with plans to continue his studies in Bologna. Within a few years, he would make the decision to set aside painting and opt for the more “popular” art of comics.
Through the expressive medium for which he became famous, Pazienza evoked his birthplace’s “lungomare” (he was indeed born in a house facing the Adriatic Sea) on multiple occasions. This stretch of coastline represented a “lesser” geographical trajectory determined by fate and choices. As he stated in a television interview with Clive Malcolm Griffiths not long before his death (he passed away on June 16, 1988, in Montepulciano, Tuscany, at the age of just 32), comparing his provincial Italian experience with the highly exotic journey of the great cartoonist Hugo Pratt:
It’s all a fake life. There’s Pratt, born who knows where, to a gypsy mother, an Irish father, who’s been to Patagonia; he lived in Argentina during a very fertile period. And then there’s me, just like this, you know? I was born on the seafront of San Benedetto, I moved to Puglia, but... This seafront, this Puglia of the 1960s, Bologna in the 1970s, Tuscany today: in the end, it’s a much smaller picture, but it resembles these grand designs. It’s fake, it’s fake here too.
A moment of this fabrication – perhaps to be understood as an ironic transfiguration of reality, but also, simultaneously, in the light of the painful need for an impossible authenticity – is explicitly represented in a comic strip titled “Sogno” (Dream), published in 1982 in the “Linus” magazine. It recounts a small dream-like experience set in the most familiar waters imaginable, those of the sea opposite his birthplace. It begins as follows:
I had a dream:
I dreamt that I set off from San Benedetto
with a rowboat in the oil sea
nine in the morning
In the shallow waters typical of the area, the dreamer catches sight of “the eyes of the razor clams” peering from the sand. The water “combs his fingers”, and, seen from this perspective, the town seems like a phantom “republic of palms and skittles”. The second stage corresponds to a second sandbank, where the protagonist lingers lazily (“I, who had a breakfast of croissants, row one stroke and then another”) and from which he places summer tourists within the frame, characterised by a “woman from Milan” standing on the beach. Further marine and convivial elements then enter the sunny and relaxed scene, leading up to the traumatic disruption of the idyll in the finale. Without interruption (and without stopping at the stop sign, as decorum would normally dictate), it envisions a dog being hit by a Fiat 131:
I dreamed that the water smelled of currents, and there was nothing but
a languor of hills and restaurant prospects, when I’ll
sit here, I’ll sit here,
and the dog crosses
the bakery clearing at a run,
emerging from a belt of reeds
(STOP, THAT’S FINE)
and gets crushed under a one-thirty-one.