Then came the damned cancer. You would always say to me, joking (but not too much): "Sick? When someone's sick, I don't go to see them, don't telephone, don't write, move to another town..." or "Dying? It's only a probability based on the incontestable fact that in the end all humans are mortal. But what if I'm the blessed exception?"

You would joke in order to seem cowardly, or was it rather, ironically, in order to show how courageous you were? But from youth on you practiced fencing, and in 1952 you qualified for the final selection for the Olympic team at Helsinki. You were intrinsically a fighter. Death never had a harder adversary to subdue. You never gave up going to festivals, participating in conferences, joking, and being (not just seeming!) serene. During times you spent in the hospital you would proselytize for animation even among the medical workers; each time your x-rays were developed, you would hold them up, saying, "Here's your storyboard, doctor."

You did story and script for highly prized advertising films that are lost and gone astray now. In your European Tales you became a kind of itinerant artistic supervisor, giving lots of guidance, but rarely getting credit as a single creator. Metamorpheus (1970), the short on which you collaborated with Czech animator Jiri Brdec
ka, and which was a powerful emotional hymn to artistic freedom, hasn't been screened for decades. No festival has shown the 14 minute-long mini-films you made with Paul Campani, four in 1968 and 10 in 1973: aphorisms, gags, striking and sarcastic lyrics, brilliant, excellent -- and forgotten.

You, Max, were a true genius. One of the most intelligent and creative people I have ever met in my whole life. You knew how to inspire, correct, stimulate, make flower, teach and encourage; you knew how to free the minds who listened to you from preconceptions that had festered in them for years. You knew how to introduce Italy to post-Disney animation, from UPA to the art of McLaren and Alexeieff. You were the charismatic mainstay of the scrawniest group that admired and promoted in our country those innovative and subversive ideas on the level of style, length and technique, so that the personal animation of the '60s and '70s developed to world-class level. You were the mainstay of the best festival of Italian animation ever organized: at Abano Terme (1970-1971), then partially moved to Lucca to combine with a comics convention. You were so cultured that any encyclopedist of any era would have envied you. There was no subject, scientific or humanistic, that you did not make yourself familiar with so that you held an original (fresh, not banal) viewpoint.

However, please note, you weren't an author. Even though your surviving files are few, and locked away in cabinets. You were a scenarist, or rather, as you taught Brdecka to say in Czech, a dramaturg. You knew how to tell stories. And you told them better, much better, aloud than in writing. In conversations you had no equal in the world, and a story told by you, person to person, was a gift of the Gods. Especially when they involved anecdotes about mathematicians with superior but disorderly minds, like Albert Einstein, Evariste Galois or Blaise Pascal.

You could make people listen, too. Once you met Osvaldo Cavandoli in the square in front of the cathedral in Milan, at 10 in the morning. Osvaldo was in a hurry, a business appointment. By 3 in the afternoon, he still hadn't gotten to the subway -- he was still transfixed, hanging on your every word. Another time at a festival you started telling some paradoxical legal anecdotes at 5 in the afternoon. We ate dinner together, had coffee, sat in the lobby of the hotel. At one o'clock that night, I admitted to myself: "I'm 22 years younger than he, I can't give up before he does!" At 5 am, I interrupted you while you were explaining to me the differences between Picasso and Braque, and wrenched myself off to bed, fully clothed.