Just a few words for the passing of someone extraordinary. Larger than life, to be sure; larger than death too, as his voice will stay with us, after a fashion, thanks to technology, although an mp3 can never compare with a live performance. I never had the good fortune to hear him live, I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard him on an excellent sound system. My only recording, I’m ashamed to say, is a cassette copied from a cassette, a hodge podge of O Sole mio and Ave Maria and Nessun Dorma. A cassette that accompanied me on a sailboat trip to Mexico, through storms both natural and of the man-made, emotional variety. But I have always known the power of that voice, how it can move you to tears even from the tinny speaker of a second-rate television.

He seemed to leave his presence behind in places he had been, a shadow, an echo. The Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco where he had once performed for free and al fresco, or so I was told, before I moved there. A street in Mostar in Bosnia where there was a music school for children that he had founded after the war.

It’s just hard to imagine a world without him; he belongs to that tiny group of people that you grow up with, your own generation or the one just ahead of you, who define your world as a better place, a place worth sticking around as long as you can, even if it’s just to watch reruns of The Three Tenors.

I went through Modena on the train about six months ago. I kept looking for balsamic vinegar distilleries. I didn’t know he lived there, or I might have shouted out the window, Ciao, Luciano!

Life has just gotten that bit smaller, and shorter. And this time Ciao seems to mean, So long, Luciano.  There’s a strange silence on the planet now, the place your voice used to fill.