Tenor Fabio Armiliato speaks and sings at partner Daniela Dessì’s funeral

Hello my darling, someone once said that the two of us communicate with our eyes. The eyes are the windows of the soul and our souls have always spoken. I have shared 16 unforgettable years with you, rich with satisfaction and an intense personal life that we have always guarded carefully and privileged above all else.

The opening of tenor Fabio Armiliato’s eulogy at the funeral of his partner Daniela Dessì was powerful and moving. The packed cathedral in Brescia also heard him sing Panis Angelicus during the course of the mass.

Mentioning that it wasn’t necessary to underline her greatness as an artist being that the messages that had poured in from all over the world were testimony to the fact, he said,

I do, however, want to commemorate your greatness as a woman, a mother, your interior beauty and your generosity, your sense of humour, your melancholy, but above all your fragility which may seem paradoxical considering your explosive personality of a true diva – diva as in divine.

To love you and to be loved by you is the most wonderful gift by destiny, but I find it hard to think that it is the same destiny that has taken you away so soon from my life. We loved spending time together and you used to say that we were stuck side by side like two postage stamps. I would take your hand, and you would say ‘don’t disappear’, yet now you have gone.

The newspaper Il giornale said that Armiliato quoted the music critic Giorgio Gualerzi who once said that there was the time of Callas and now the time of Dessì.

You have earned immortality and will always be remembered as an interpreter that others will be judged by. You are and always will be the pride and joy of our country.

Dessì was involved in charity work and a group from the Shalom community for drug rehabilitation were present in the church.

A recording of Daniela Dessì singing Schubert’s Ave Maria was played.

The next opera season at Brescia’s Teatro Grande will be dedicated to her.

Gramilano( Editor )

Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano’) about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.

His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia’ column for Dancing Times magazine.