Battle over Pavarotti’s 250-mn-pound fortune?

The women in the life of Luciano Pavarotti — the Italian tenor who had brought opera to the masses...

The women in the life of Luciano Pavarotti — the Italian tenor who had brought opera to the masses — could be in for a battle over his 250-million-pound fortune, according to a British tabloid.

While the opera superstar’s three adult daughters, who had sided with their mother — Pavarotti’s first wife Adua Veroni following the couple’s divorce in 2000 — but recently had a rapprochement with their father, have lined up on one side, his second wife Nicoletta Mantovani’s on the other.

Though Pavarotti had changed his will last month in favour of Lorenza, Cristina and Giuliana — his daughters from his first marriage — friends now expect a fierce fight over his riches, which include several homes in New York, Monte Carlo and Modena, his home town in Italy, The Sun reported.

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“It’s all very sad — he isn’t even cold in his tomb yet and now all this is coming out,” the tenor’s dietitian Professor Andrea Strata was quoted as saying. Friends said that the singer had also grown closer to his first wife Adua after he left her to marry Nicoletta.

Professor Strata’s wife Franca said the tenor always spoke highly of Adua. “He kept saying you just don’t cancel nearly 40 years of marriage like that. He said that she had raised the children well. I know that in the last year they had got very close again.”

On the other hand, relations between Pavarotti and Nicoletta, 37, had “cooled” in the months before his death last week aged 71, said insiders who claimed he had visited a lawyer to change his will in favour of his daughters. “Businesses that were in other family members’ names were returned to his name,” a close friend told the tabloid.

The original document was drawn up just last year in New York, where Nicoletta — the mother of his four-year-old daughter Alice — spends much of her time. Pavarotti had reportedly told friends that little Alice was the only thing keeping him and Nicoletta together.