“The body of the world’s most famous castrato singer, Farinelli, has been exhumed to try to find out how his virtuoso voice developed. Scholars in the northern Italian city of Bologna will measure his skull and bones and perform DNA tests… In 17th and 18th Century Italy, up to 4,000 boys a year, often from poor families, were castrated from the age of eight upwards. They became opera singers and soloists in church choirs and royal palaces. Very few actually went on to achieve success, but those who did became the pop stars of their day, and they behaved as such.”