Michele Merlo did not make it: the singer of “Amici” dies at 28

He did not make it Michele Merlo, the former competitor of Friends hospitalized for three days at the Maggiore Hospital in Bologna following a cerebral hemorrhage due to fulminant leukemia. The boy’s condition, who dies at the age of 28, immediately appeared very serious after a delicate surgery to which he underwent the night between Thursday and Friday. “The family consultants inform that Michele Merlo passed away in the intensive care unit of the Maggiore hospital in Bologna late in the evening” reads the note released in the press, together with the anger at the fact that Michele showed up for days ago in the hospital showing severe pain in the head and then being sent home soon after, for what had been branded a “trivial viral form”.

“He went to the emergency room in Vergato in full autonomy,” said his father Domenico. “He complained of symptoms that a shrewd doctor would have picked up. She had had a severe migraine for days, neck pain and plaques in her throat, a typical sign of leukemia. If they had examined him they would have seen that he had bruises. We don’t have a medical report but a barcode bracelet that I have at home. And an audio that my son sent to the girlfriend saying I’m pissed off, they told me I stuffed the emergency room with two plaques in my throat. Instead he was tired. Michele had two arms like that. He played sports, he didn’t drink, he never used drugs, he liked the good life, eating well, good things, he traveled far and wide in Italy ». In the past few hours, Michele Merlo’s mother, one of the first to tell what had happened to him on Facebook, had invited everyone to pray for her son. Emma Marrone dedicated his first live concert after the pandemic from the Arena di Verona. “You are in my heart,” he said from the stage to the thunderous applause of the audience.

Michele Merlo was originally from Marostica, in the province of Vicenza, and began to be passionate about music since adolescence, learning to play the guitar and starting to write his own songs growing up with the myth of the Kings of Leon, the Arctic Monkeys and Jenff Buckey. After trying to audition to participate in the tenth edition of X Factor, Merlo achieves success in 2017 thanks to Friends, to which he introduces himself with the stage name of Mike Bird. In that edition, won by the dancer Andreas Muller, Michele begins to get noticed not only for his singing skills, but also for continued bickering with his coach Morgan – who left the show that year before it ended – and because of her romance with Shady, another student on the show with whom she had a relationship that ended shortly after the show ended. In 2020 try to access the selections of Sanremo Giovani, but without success.