We sweep up the crunchy gravel of Bocelli’s drive. We hear his voice resonating from his grand Tuscan home. He is sitting on one of his patios strumming his guitar and singing to himself. The voice is creamy, chocolatey, velvety, all the textures women love. He is darkly tanned, tousle-haired, tall, testosterone-fuelled but with long, fluttering eyelashes. His eyes are usually closed. When he opens them you get a glimpse of cloudy grey eyes that stopped singing many years ago.

Last night we had a few moments at dinner in a chi-chi little seafood restaurant by the sea in Forte dei Marmi. It was important to have a plan of action before the interview to ensure nothing was lost in translation. We were a large group, including Carlo, Bocelli’s assistant. Bocelli doesn’t speak much English. He usually insists on the same interpreter, but I insisted on bringing my own: Felicia Friguglietti, my Italian housekeeper, who loves a swelling aria and often listens to a Bocelli CD while doing the ironing.

At dinner we learn that Bocelli’s usual Anglo-Italian translator, Consuelo Bixio Hackney, would also be there. Consuelo is an interesting mix of elegance and intensity, vulnerability and authority. I can see why he likes her. I’d read that in one interview an interpreter refused to translate a question about his blindness. Was that you, I asked? “Yes. There is no point in asking him because he would end the interview.”

I tell her I will be asking him why he doesn’t want to talk about his blindness. Consuelo sighs and says: “If you want to get on well with him, you perhaps shouldn’t ask that. But perhaps I can answer that for you. He just disregards it. He figures it’s a low priority. He doesn’t want to be seen as a victim. He doesn’t want people to think that his success is because of tragedy. Music is hugely consoling to him, which you might say is because he’s enclosed in his own world, it has provided a great support for him.”

But if he communicates through his music, surely that is a direct result of his blindness? If he can’t see colours, he feels them and transmits them emotionally. Our personalities are all informed by what we have had to go through. How can you separate them?

“He thinks it’s private and nobody’s business. He wouldn’t have wanted to talk about his marriage when it fell apart, either.” He was married for 10 years to Enrica Cenzatti. They have two sons: Amos, 13, and Matteo, 10. They live next door. She is described as his estranged wife yet they are hardly estranged. After he was separated from her he met Veronica Berti, then 21, now 27. She sings on his new album, or rather she makes muffled noises in the background on a couple of tracks. “Singing is rather a big word to describe what I did on it,” she admits. As it turns out, Bocelli is quite happy to talk about love and sex. Particularly sex. In fact, when he talks about sex and sport he talks effortlessly in English. On these issues, nothing can be misunderstood.

He is extremely macho. Perhaps he does not want to appear vulnerable. I tell Consuelo that not talking about his blindness will be like a large elephant in the room that goes unacknowledged.

“He is aware of the elephant theory, that if you ignore something it becomes bigger. He simply disregards it.” A music-industry insider who begged me not to name him says: “The reason he’s touchy is because his blindness does give him something else. It’s an aura. It’s a spiritual quality. He’s up there with his eyes closed and it looks like he’s praying, a little Jesus-like.”

Indeed, Celine Dion once said that listening to Bocelli sing was like listening to the voice of God. Elizabeth Taylor said it brought her out in golden goose bumps. He himself once said: “You see clearly only through your heart. The essential is invisible to the eye.” He was born with glaucoma, which rapidly spread. His parents took him to doctors. There were operations.

(He was in hospital when he was three when his mother noticed that the operatic singing coming from the radio in the next room was the only thing that stopped him crying.) When he was 12 he was playing football. The ball was a weighted one for partially sighted people, so you can hear it. It splattered his head, causing a brain haemorrhage, and after that he never regained his sight. Yet there was triumph over tragedy. That’s what draws you in.

The sales figures speak for themselves. He has sold more than 50m records worldwide. He is now the world’s greatest-selling tenor, having taken over from Pavarotti. He trained as a lawyer and worked as a public defender in Pisa, and started off singing Sinatra songs in piano bars. But opera was what he loved. He demoed a song that the Italian pop singer Zucchero wrote with Bono for Pavarotti. When Pavarotti heard it he said give it to the guy who did the demo, because he thought Bocelli’s voice was special. He became a mentor and friend, and Bocelli sang at his wedding to Nicoletta Mantovani in 2003. In 1997 he sang Time to Say Goodbye with Sarah Brightman. To some it was Euro-schmaltz, to others it was balm for the soul.

Bocelli has always divided critics and public. The music critic Norman Lebrecht once wrote: “Bocelli is, plain and simple, a San Remo smoocher who was snapped up by some desperate classical labels as a marketing gimmick. It is the blind leading the deaf.” Bocelli, clearly a sensitive man, used to feel terrorised by these critics, and set out to prove he could do anything a sighted person could do, including appear on stage in opera – in Puccini’s La Bohème, Verdi’s Macbeth and, perhaps most impressively, in Massenet’s Werther, where he rode on stage on a horse, dismounted and strode about singing vigorously. He has always ridden horses.

“I used to think, the wilder the better. If there was any horse that people were afraid to ride I would have to do it just to conquer it,” he told me later.

When we meet he is wearing a vibrant purple shirt, which makes his skin seem rich and brown. Felicia and I are ushered into the echoey house. It’s Italian chintz: creamy silky furniture, dainty china objects. Veronica and Bocelli have separate bedrooms on the third floor. His leg taps up and down nervously. Consuelo told me she thinks he sees shapes, but I’m not sure he sees my leg as his foot keeps thrashing across it.

First of all you see him thinking, trying to get the measure of me. I comment on his purple and say that when I went to interview Pavarotti I was wearing purple and was told this wasn’t allowed. Purple is the colour of death for superstitious Italians. I was forced to change into a pyjama top as it was the only thing I had with me. A naughty smile flashes. “That was probably because he wanted you to wear pyjamas. You had to take your clothes off,” he says. He was probably right. Pavarotti checked me out for further purple by noticing a bow on my bra. He didn’t ask me to take it off, but he called it “a nest of beauty”.

The latest CD, Incanto, is full of love songs. How does he define love? Another smile flickers across his face. He loves to talk like a poet. He can recite Dante, and delights in finding erotic poems or epithets of wisdom. “Love is the engine and the petrol of life, the essence, the hard drive and the software. Ninety per cent of the things we do, we do for love. Of course there’s all kinds of love. Parental love, and the love that brings a man and a woman together. Women seek different things from love.”

What does he seek? “The same things most men do. I like beauty and youth, and hands – the first thing you touch – and I respond to voices.”

Veronica has youth and beauty. She is wearing a Pucci-esque brightly coloured silk shift dress. Her limbs are long and thin. She has dark, shiny hair, long and recently waved. The met five years ago and now she works in his management. For the photo shoot she smoothes down his clothes. She strokes his cheek and calls him “Bello”. He smiles sweetly and his lashes flutter. She seems practical and nurturing. And he allows her to nurture him, which I suspect doesn’t come that easily.

He has just turned 50. “I think very little about ageing.” This is where you want to say he looks good for 50, but you don’t because he’s on a roll, a kind of spiritual roll. “It is important to live life to the full. Drawing each breath to fill the lungs. The purpose of life [he loves talking about the purpose of life] is that while the body weakens, the soul becomes stronger. I’m not saying I’ve managed with the strong soul at all, because the strengthening of the soul goes hand in hand with releasing material things. Someone who is old and still attached to these things has lost the battle. I’m still very attached to many things. I still like the physical aspect of love, but as you get older you should give it less importance.”

I don’t really think sex is like materialism. “No, but it’s frivolous. Apart from that I’ve succeeded in giving up the frivolous things in life.” Does that mean you’ve given up fun? “I’ve tried to give up vanity and be less concerned with what people think of me, like the critics. Happiness is the daughter of hope and desire… material things are no guarantee of lasting happiness.”

So, does he not enjoy retail therapy? “Retail therapy is very dangerous. It’s damaging.” Indeed, for all his success he is not ostentatious. I tell him shoes are my route to happiness, therefore I must be very damaged. He laughs. “You are just the same as all women.” Concerned that I think he is too ascetic he reassures: “Really I’ve experienced these excessive things in the past, and they’ve only brought me disappointment. I’ve tried out the replacement theory in terms of boats and cars. When I reached boat level I was really in trouble. I had a yacht, but I got rid of it. Now I do have a boat but it’s more of a dinghy. Well, it’s not really a dinghy, but it’s a little boat just for going out with the children.” Is it a speed boat, does it go fast? He gets very animated: “Yes, it does go very fast. My spirit is still very weak.”

He explains that he was inspired by Tolstoy and Pascal to rage against materialism. He has long been a fan of Russian literature. At school he was not particularly studious. He was sporty. One imagines that must have been seriously curtailed after his accident, although he likes to give the impression nothing stops him. His father was assistant manager at a bank, and the manager was a man called Amos Martelacci, who Bocelli named his son after. Amos was a mentor who loved Bocelli like a son and introduced him to classic literature and a cerebral world.

“The single most influential person in my life. He had amassed tens of thousands of books. He came into my life when I was 18 and taught me to doubt apparent certainties. He was happy for my success, but viewed it with detachment, showing me how to accord it the correct value.”

So what does give him the most pleasure? “I’m afraid it can be the fatal attraction of a handshake, a kind word or a heartfelt compliment. These are the things that continue to be the source of my weakness. This is my battle.” I’m not sure if this is a form of seduction or an invitation to flirt with him. Pretty difficult with two translators and my own less-than-basic grasp of Italian. But I tell him I’m not sure he should fight expressions of human warmth. “But I’ve already paid my dues for the pleasures. My life has been very untidy.”

He was very unhappy when his marriage fell apart. The dynamic of his life changed, and Enrica couldn’t change with it. He went from piano bar to opera house to constant touring, and she didn’t come with him. He was completely separate when he met Veronica. “I trust I’ve never hurt anyone. I’ve always tried to give my best. I never played with people’s feelings.”

Do you prefer to be the one who loves most in a relationship or the one who is loved most?

“I like to love. I am not ashamed of deep feelings. But if you have deep feelings you get them back, at least in the medium term. Who is to say if the metal or the magnet has the greater pull. Human relationships are that balance, and the greater the pull towards, the greater the pull away. Love can burn you up or it can burn slowly. A slow heat over time or a flame in a haystack… I don’t make ideologies, they have always been the cause of pain and mankind’s mistakes. I admire men who have many ideas, a few ideals and no ideologies.”

What about the ideal of marriage, is that for you again? “Never say never, as you say in English.” He laughs a little velvety, warm laugh. Veronica is often described as his fiancée because it comes from the Italian fidanzata, but it doesn’t mean they are promised to marry.

I am beginning to feel disorientated because Bocelli is both open and closed. He reads who you are and communicates who he is vividly, despite language and sight barriers. “Singing is an important instrument to communicate with the souls of people. I don’t believe all music is good. But I like to feel my soul is raised. When I listen to Franco Corelli, often my eyes fill with tears.”

He hates talking about himself. He thinks it’s vain. He wrote a book, The Music of Silence. It was his story, but he wrote it in the third person, calling himself Amos after his mentor and son. One wonders if that was so we could see him more clearly or so he could hide. He hates to admit vulnerability, but talks about how his stage fright has only increased over the years because he is worried he will let people down. Yet he says that for so much of his life he’s been without fear.

“I think this is due to my passionate nature and extreme character. It always led me to try something new, to exaggerate possibilities, to go beyond what one should do. I think it’s because strong, healthy people don’t think of danger. I’ve got away with making mistakes. I can drink lots of wine without a hangover and ride reckless horses without a problem. I can ride all day without getting tired. [I’m not sure if this is an allusion to sex or not. He smiles the same smiles when he talks about horses, sex and love.] It was, of course, naive to think strength was the most important thing. It was all about my ego. It was primitive thinking, but that’s how I was. I always wanted to do the most dangerous sports.”

His brother, Alberto, three years his junior, was a cautious child who tried to restrain him, but he didn’t want to be restrained. He would ride fast scooters with Alberto on the back, Bocelli steering, always determined that his physical strength would outweigh his physical disability.

“I like boxing. I idolised Muhammad Ali. When I was a boy I loved to engage in danger and I liked learning to fight.” The elephant’s in the room now. How could he fight without being able to see his opponent? How blind is he? What is he trying to prove? “A couple of years ago I decided to take up windsurfing. I went with a friend the same age and my friend said, ‘Oh, this is impossible, it’s just too hard, we’re too old.’ My reckless character is exemplified by the fact that this was red rag to a bull… I am getting better now. For instance, I don’t really ski, I just go to keep Veronica and the kids company. I admit I would be a danger to myself and others.”

He does still ride. He has two horses: Jazair, a 23-year-old stallion he’s had since he was one, and Jazair’s daughter, a one-year-old called Cloud. “I’m too fat to ride her, but I ride him all the time. This horse has protected me. When I was younger he wouldn’t let me do certain things because he’s much more intelligent than me. It’s strange that I like sports because I’m very lazy and I’m getting less restless. Last month we were in Australia, and I told my son I couldn’t surf because I had a concert the next day, so I stayed on the beach like an old warrior in repose.”

Was it really about the concert or was surfing just too much? “No, the concert was an excuse. But my regime before concerts is scrupulous. I have no wine, I don’t speak to anyone all day, I eat moderately and have no sex.” Is that because you are very noisy when you have sex? Raucous laughter. “No, it’s because sex is the enemy of the athlete and the artist. Anyway, when it’s not a very important concert I break that rule.” His passion for singing and his sexual being seem inextricably linked. At this point Veronica comes in, no doubt intrigued by the cackling. “Rules are meant to be broken,” she says. Everybody is smiling. If I’d broken the rule about talking about the blindness, no doubt we wouldn’t be. “This has been an unusual interview,” he says, then asks if we can turn the tape recorders off to tell me something off the record. I have a digital and analogue recorder by his side. I had been told he is such a technophile he can identify all brands of tape recorder by the way they turn on and off and the arrangement of the buttons. He turns them off and tells me he’s glad I didn’t ask the boring question that everybody asks, which is: do you sing opera or do you sing popular music? Unfortunately he wiped off the entire interview because he pressed erase, not stop, on the digital recorder. The vintage analogue one survived.

When we turn the tape back on he tells me about his love of koala bears. “They are the closest animal to me. They remind me of me in my youth because they are brave, they are fearless. They sleep a lot, eat and have sex, and I think they do a lot of thinking. They must be very wise, and when you touch them it is the most wonderful feeling.”

Even though his eyes are closed they seem to be smiling while he has the imprint of the koala bear in his head. There is a sweetness about him. The same sweetness that is in his voice is in his soul. Veronica takes him out for the photo shoot.He wanders around shirtless for a while like a gladiator. Carlo says Bocelli doesn’t want to wear the slate-grey suit the photographer has brought for him, but he puts on an almost identical one from his all-Armani wardrobe. Is that because he wants to control, or because he can’t see the difference? Maybe his deal with Armani doesn’t allow him to wear anything else. Either way, he seems happy to keep that lost in translation.

Explore Music

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette