Valiano Natali

Valiano Natali (9 December 1918 – 30 March 2000) was an Italian operatic tenor.

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Valiano was the son of Guido and Giovanna Lunardi;  he was born in Agliana, a suburb of the Tuscan city of Pistoia, but relocated with his family to nearby Prato at the age of seven.

Natali started his singing career as an Italian pop singer. Due to his vocal talent, he first got noticed at the fashionable nightlife spot Caffè Margherita, in Viareggio, during a singing festival. In the same seaside resort town he met Maresca Bacci, a Florentine girl who was to become his inseparable life companion. They moved to Florence and married in 1942.

After World War II. Natali, who had meanwhile embraced opera, won a contest at the world-famous Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, launching a brilliant career as a tenor that would soon bring him to sing in all the major theaters next to the great opera protagonists of the time, like Mario Del Monaco, Giuseppe Di Stefano, Tito Gobbi and Maria Callas.

With Callas and Di Stefano, in 1953, at Teatro Comunale in Florence, Natali sang the part of Arturo in Lucia di Lammermoor, directed by maestro Franco Ghione. During the same year, again with Callas and Di Stefano, Natali recorded the opera, directed by maestro Tullio Serafin, in one of the most unforgettable recordings of Donizetti's masterpiece, which has been remastered and been part of opera lovers' collections to this day.