Sentimentality and Andrea Bocelli

There are few sensations as powerful as one feels when listening to Italian Opera. This I knew from my earliest childhood memories of visiting my grandmother.

The first time I heard Andrea Bocelli’s voice was over ten years ago one night before bed. I was visiting my Grammy for a Friday night of buttery food and endless grandchild spoils when the evening reached its eventual end and it was time to wind down an impossibly rambunctious child. In keeping with her nighttime routine, before turning off her bedside lamp, from the modest pallet I made on the floor next to her bed, I listened as Grammy slid a CD into her nearby player. And the voice that rang out, the voice that defined so many of my childhood experiences, was the incredible voice of Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. 

It was Thanksgiving 2024 when I was most recently reminded of this music I have grown to admire and love. As we sat around Grammy’s dining room table, my cousins and I generously stuffed mushrooms in preparation for the next day’s feast. By now, all of her grandchildren have come to expect Andrea Bocelli’s voice in the background of any meal we prepare, however, this particular evening, I was especially struck with sentimentality over the melody accompanying our work. For sheer curiosity, I casually asked Grammy over the mushroom-covered table if she would ever be willing to take me to a Bocelli concert, and with the face of someone who has been waiting their whole life to be asked one particular question, she lit up with excitement over the inquiry! That night, the date was set for Feb. 8 to see Andrea Bocelli at Knoxville’s Thompson-Boling Arena. 

With palpable child-like anticipation, I slid past the fellow opera-enjoyers in our row while holding Grammy’s hand to find our seats for the concert. As the lights dimmed and the Knoxville Orchestra gracefully took their place, one light focused on the stage. With confidence, Andrea Bocelli stepped into the circle and began his first song, “La Donna È Mobile (Rigoletto).” With equal perfection to his CDs which I have heard hundreds of times, Bocelli delivered a listening experience unparalleled to anything one could dream of hearing elsewhere. Listening to Bocelli live meant being a child again, lying on a pallet in my grandmother’s room, as if I was hearing him with new ears for the first time. 

To memorialize the most perfect concert I will ever attend, Grammy and I laughed in the pouring rain as we walked the half-mile back to our car. In keeping with my daily poem creation, the next day on our (dry) drive back home, it was this walk, nature’s unforgiving rain, that inspired the creation of the lines you read here.