He is a tall, blond, thin, well-dressed [1] son of a bourgeois family, and his distinctive physical feature is an exaggerated, prominent hooked nose.
Behind that front, Zanardi is an utterly amoral schemer who is always looking for either drugs or revenge, and always gets both in the end, literally destroying other people's lives without the slightest trace of remorse.
Zanardi is usually accompanied in his doings and wrongdoings by two schoolmates, Colasanti (full name: Roberto Colasanti) and Petrilli (full name: Sergio Petrilli, often in the endearing form Sergino, or "Little Sergio"), with which he has established a sort of Clockwork Orange partnership, and who provide help, counterpoint and occasional comic relief to Zanardi's archetypal amorality.
It is worthy of notice that the three almost never address each other by name in conversation, resorting either to surnames (which automatically entails a sort of detachment in Italian) or to distortions of them, thus Zanardi becomes Zanna (fang); Colasanti becomes Colas; Petrilli becomes Pietra (literally stone or rock as a possible pun on drugs).
In fact, Petrilli dies a horrible death in the last story of the Frigidaire canon, Notte di Carnevale (Carnival Night), being burned alive in a Zanardi-staged prank arson of an all-female religious college which runs amok.
They were reprinted with colour by unknown Art School students in Zanardi, a collection published by Primo Carnera Editore in 1983, with a new black-and-white story tying the episodes together entitled La proprietà transitiva dell'uguaglianza (The Transitive Property of Equality).