Andrea Pazienza and Sandro Pertini share an affinity. In the partisan president, the author saw the last specimen of a race of men as tough but pure as children, a ray of light in the dark night of the First Republic. He was surrounded by shady characters, busybodies who would do anything to enrich themselves and keep their seats. In 1978 Sandro Pertini brought his pipe and his explosive presence to the Quirinale and became President of the Republic. In the same year, Andrea Pazienza, together with the Bologna gang, drew small masterpieces for the independent magazines Cannibale, Frigidaire and Il Male. Italy was torn apart by the war, and in this dark period Pazienza invented the amusing character of Pert, who led the real Pertini to invite him to dinner at the Quirinale. The artist and the president would never meet, however, for 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, great lucubrations, and had that revolutionary nature that mocks authority by disrupting its rigid and austere structure.