Adelina Patti was born in Madrid, Spain, on 19 February 1843, the youngest child of the Sicilian tenor Salvatore Patti and soprano Caterina Barilli, who were working in Spain at the time. She had no Welsh blood and no childhood connection to Wales at all: she grew up in New York, made her operatic debut aged 16 in 1859, and went on to become one of the most celebrated sopranos of the nineteenth century, praised by Verdi as perhaps the finest singer he had ever heard. Her connection to Wales came much later in life, and was a matter of choice rather than birth.
In 1878, at the height of her fame, Patti purchased Craig-y-Nos Castle in the Swansea Valley for £3,500 and set about turning it into her private estate, adding a clock tower, winter gardens and, in 1891, her own theatre modelled on Bayreuth. She made the castle her permanent home for the rest of her life, entertaining royalty and fellow musicians there, funding a local railway station, and giving generously to the surrounding mining communities through benefit concerts. In 1918 she gifted the estate's Winter Garden building to the city of Swansea, where it still stands today as the Patti Pavilion.
Patti made some of her earliest gramophone recordings at Craig-y-Nos in 1905 and 1906, several decades into her career. She died at the castle on 27 September 1919, aged 76, and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Her connection to Wales is honestly one of residence rather than ancestry — she chose the Swansea Valley as her home for over 40 years and left a lasting mark on Welsh cultural life, but she was not born in Wales, nor of Welsh descent.