PATIENCE ANDREA PERTINI. markers and collage on paper. Cm 17x13. That between Andrea Pazienza and Sandro Pertini is an elective affinity. In the partisan president, the author saw the last specimen of a race of men as tough but pure as children, a gleam of light in the dark night of the First Republic. Surrounding him were shady figures, busybodies ready to do anything to enrich themselves and keep their seats. In 1978 Sandro Pertini brought his pipe and explosive presence to the Quirinale, becoming President of the Republic. That same year Andrea Pazienza draws small masterpieces with the Bologna gang in the independent magazines Cannibale, Frigidaire, and Il Male. Italy is divided by the Lead Years, and in this dark period Pazienza invents the amusing character of Pert who will prompt the real Pertini to invite him to dinner at the Quirinale. The artist and the president, however, would never meet.There were many similarities between the rebellious Pazienza and the partisan President Pertini. The two never met, but they were both men of action, little inclined to rhetoric, grand lucubrations, and had that revolutionary nature that mocks authority by disrupting its rigid and severe structure.