Mario Del Monaco (27 July 1915 – 16 October 1982) was an Italian operatic tenor. Del Monaco was born in Florence, into a musical upper-class family, to a Neapolitan father and to a mother of Sicilian descent. As a young boy he studied the violin but had a passion for singing. He graduated from the Rossini Conservatory at Pesaro, where he first met and sang with Renata Tebaldi, with whom he would form something of an operatic dream team of the 1950s. His early mentors as a singer included Arturo ...