Love Me Tenor

Indeed, Bocelli's journey from the olive groves of Lajatico to the Koosh balls of The Rosie O'Donnell Show is a testament to the loopy power of chance. Raised on a farm, he was exposed to opera as a child simply because it seemed to calm him down. ''My mother told me that when I heard for the first time a tenor's voice, I was crying and I stopped,'' he says. He started singing simply because his schoolmates asked him to. Having suffered from glaucoma since birth, Bocelli completely lost his sight at age 12 after sustaining a head injury during a soccer game.

Later, he studied law at the University of Pisa. ''Law was not for me,'' he says. ''Because I was thinking always of the singing.'' He dumped his job as an attorney and his life turned into a series of serendipities. While Bocelli trained his voice with tenor Franco Corelli and paid his rent by crooning on the Tuscan piano-bar circuit, the Italian pop star Zucchero launched a nationwide search: Zucchero hoped to team up with Luciano Pavarotti on a duet called ''Miserere,'' and he wanted to cut a demo tape with a tenor to show Pavarotti how the duet would sound. As folklore has it, Pavarotti sat down to listen to Bocelli's version of the song and uttered a proclamation: ''You do not need me to sing it. Let Andrea sing 'Miserere' with you, for there is no one finer.'' (Pavarotti sang it anyway.)

Life unfolded some more. Bocelli toured with Zucchero, struck up a friendship with Pavarotti, and cut a deal with Sugar, an Italian record label. ''When I heard him for the first time, I was shocked,'' recalls label president Caterina Caselli-Sugar. ''I had never heard such big emotions.'' A flamboyant German boxer named Henry Maske had the same response: As Maske got ready for his farewell bout in 1996, he chose ''Time to Say Goodbye,'' Bocelli's heady duet with the English soprano Sarah Brightman, as his Rocky-style anthem. Maske lost the fight but Bocelli won the war. ''Time to Say Goodbye'' went on to conquer charts across Europe.

As for America, well, Bocelli was still just one of those European infatuations—sort of like kidney pie or David Hasselhoff—until PBS aired a 1997 concert called A Night in Tuscany as part of last December's fund-raising drive. Middlebrow baby boomers wept into their NPR tote bags; suddenly Romanza was cozying up to Master P and Metallica on the pop charts. It went gold two weeks later. Even more impressive, Romanza trailed just behind Hanson's Middle of Nowhere and U2's Pop as PolyGram's third-biggest global hit last year. There's more on the way: a new collection of arias, a cut on the Quest for Camelot soundtrack in May, even talk of an AT&T commercial that might debut during the farewell episode of Seinfeld. When the Kennedy Center announced that Bocelli would perform his first American concert on April 19, the phone lines at Philips, Bocelli's American label, were clogged for days. ''We get hundreds of consumer calls every week. People are obsessed with him,'' says Philips Music Group vice president Lisa Altman. ''Because Andrea sings in Italian, people have the sense that they are getting a little bit of culture. It's culture for the masses. It's culture that makes you feel good.''