Andrea Bocelli, the blind Italian opera singer whose album "Romanza" is an international chart-topper, has already gotten more fame than he ever bargained for.
"If tomorrow the success goes away for me, it's not a problem," Bocelli says in the April 17 Entertainment Weekly. "I could read, because I love very much to read books. Before I had success I read a lot, and now I don't find the time."A glaucoma sufferer since birth, the 39-year-old Bocelli went completely blind at age 12 after a head injury in a soccer game. Never bowing to the disability, he went on to study law at the University of Pisa.
"Law was not for me," he said. "Because I was thinking always about the singing."
His duet with British singer Sarah Brightman "Time to Say Goodbye" was a European hit in 1996, but his success in America came later, following a 1997 PBS concert "A Night in Tuscany," which launched "Romanza" into the CD sales stratosphere.