“In 1994, shortly after he’d won the San Remo Song Festival in the ‘new voices’ category for his song ‘Il mare calma della sera’,” Laura Biancalani, CEO of The Andrea Bocelli Foundation wrote me, “I knocked on Andrea’s front door to ask him to organize a concert to benefit a local hospice for the terminally ill. Impressed that only at age 18 I was dedicated at helping others, he agreed and we’ve been close friends and colleagues ever since.”

Bocelli’s first major international collaboration took place in January 2010 after a disastrous earthquake in Haiti which killed thousands and destroyed infrastructures. He, his manager Veronica Berti, whom he met in 2002 and married in 2014, and Biancalani worked with Father Rick Frechette, the founder of St. Luc Fondation there, whom they’d met a few months before at a New York concert and with whom they still collaborate.