In his splendid home in the hills overlooking the Adriatic, Luciano Pavarotti is pushed slowly from room to room in a wheelchair to which he must stay riveted from morning to night - the last throne of the king of the tenors.

Despite the gravity of his illness, he does not have the distressed, disconsolate air of someone who has seen death from up close. That unmistakeably sunny warmth of his voice is still there, as is the naughty-boy smile that starts in the eyes before moving to the lips.

We are friends. I have known him for 40 years.

I have heard him at La Scala and in theatres across the world. I saw him for the first time in London, in the 1960s when, during a production of La Bohème at Covent Garden, he was called in to replace the great Giuseppe Di Stefano, who was indisposed.

Di Stefano is among those who telephone him every day for news of his health."He called me only yesterday," says the maestro, as everybody calls him. "His voice for me is music itself. He was the inspiration, with his perfect emission, his open vowels and his unique phrasing. Despite my condition, the fellowship of the Three Tenors has not been dissolved. Plácido Domingo has come to see me a couple of times. José Carreras phones me.

"We've had a great run," he went on. "But I don't listen to myself any longer. I don't want to hear myself. If you were to invite me to dinner and, in an effort to please me, you put on one of my old records I'd turn on my heels. If you wanted me to stay, then you could play me Plácido."

He sits there, a huge, bulky figure.

He says: "I have been a happy and fortunate man for 65 years. Then came this blow. And now I am paying the price of all that happiness and good fortune. But I find sustenance in my childhood, which was both poor and happy, and I look at things calmly.

"Illness has never caused me anguish. You feel the tumour inside of you. It works at you. But I am and will remain optimistic until I die.

"I have had everything in life, truly everything. So if it were all taken away, then God and I would be even."

Alice, his daughter [by his second marriage] trips into the room like a pixie, demanding his attention. "Come on, dad. Let's go to the swimming pool."

"I don't know if you understand this", says the king of melodrama, raising an eyelid with difficulty. "But this is not an invitation. It is an order. And I, like Garibaldi, obey."

· An edited interview by Ettore Mo, published by Corriere della Sera on August 15 2006