Marco Bianchi

Franca Valeri was a really famous actress in Italy, also a stage director – and a huge opera buff. With her second husband, conductor Maurizio Rinaldi, she donated a yearly singing competition "Premio Mattia Battistini"; she even literally adopted one of the prize winners as her daughter, soprano Stefania Bonfadelli. And from 1980 to Maurizio Rinaldi's death in 1995, they ran a touring opera company, named after Mattia Battistini as well; Valeri would do the stage direction, Rinaldi conducted, and they toured the Italian provinces, but also North Africa (Tunisia, Egypt).

For all those 15 years, Marco Bianchi sang with Valeri's Compagnia Mattia Battistini.

After that, he was a voice teacher in Rome, and continued to give lots of aria concerts, in all sorts of venues from venerable Italian provincial theaters, to church halls, and to those enterprises designed to be considered "amazing" by foreign tourists, with both musicians and singers in baroque costumes. He definitely missed the right moment to retire, as Youtube videos of his later concerts painfully demonstrate.

Reference 1; reference 2: La Provincia, 8 August 2020; reference 3; reference 4; reference 5; reference 6