Pavarotti set to wed ex-secretary
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Mantovani credited with reviving Pavarotti's career after hip replacement
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MODENA, Italy (Reuters) -- Opera star Luciano Pavarotti will marry his ex-secretary Nicoletta Mantovani on Saturday at a ceremony in northern Italy boasting a celebrity guest list and hosted by the couple's baby daughter.
The pair, who will wed in the singer's home town of Modena, have been together since the mid-1990s when Pavarotti left his first wife for Mantovani, who is half his age.
"Alice joyfully invites you to the wedding of daddy Luciano and mummy Nicoletta," reads the invitation from the couple's 11-month-old daughter.
A host of stars, from rockers Bono and Sting to Juventus footballer Alessandro del Piero, are expected to attend the wedding which has been eagerly anticipated by Italian gossip magazines and television chat shows.
On this occasion Pavarotti, widely accredited with bringing opera to the masses, will leave the singing to fellow tenor Andrea Bocelli who is set to perform Ave Maria during the civil ceremony.
Spanish tenors Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras are also expected to attend the marriage in Modena's central theatre. Pavarotti, who turned 68 in October, dazzled audiences in the early 1990s singing alongside the Spaniards as the Three Tenors.
But his career began 30 years earlier when the big Italian, immediately recognizable for his wide smile and jet-black hair, appeared in "La Boheme." His effortlessly rich, rolling voice has made him one of the world's highest-paid singers.
Pavarotti, who says he will retire in 2005, met Mantovani when she was still a student. Once his personal assistant, she was seen as the driving force for revitalizing his career after a hip replacement in 1998.
Their relationship became public when photographers pictured them kissing on a beach holiday and he separated from his wife of 37 years Adua, with whom he had three daughters, in 1996.
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