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Matteo Berrettini's girlfriend, Melissa Satta, recently revealed that they first met at a mutual friend's dinner party where they hit it off and exchanged numbers.
Before Satta, the 27-year-old tennis star was dating Australian player Ajla Tomljanovic for nearly three years, as was shown in Netflix's documentary Break Point.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Satta spoke at length about their relationship and how it was becoming more serious. She explained that they kept in touch after their initial meeting, despite living in different cities, by chatting on WhatsApp regularly.
"In Miami, at a dinner with mutual friends. We talked to each other, we exchanged phone numbers and we started talking from there. The next day we were both leaving. My life is in Milan, he lives in Monte Carlo."
"A thousand chats on WhatsApp. Which never ended. I've met people at dinner and exchanged numbers, but often it ends as it began. Not with Matteo. If we are still here, it is because then we managed to meet in various cities," she added.
Berrettini's form on the tennis tour has been poor this year, having won only seven out of thirteen matches he played. He suffered early exits at the Australian Open, BNP Paribas Open, and the Miami Open, losing to Andy Murray, Taro Daniel, and Mackenzie McDonald, respectively.
Some blame his poor performance on his new relationship with Satta, but both of them have hit back at the criticism. The Italian player recently expressed his astonishment at a personal relationship being seen as a 'distraction'.
“At this point in life, seeing a relationship as a distraction for a professional athlete seems disrespectful to me," Matteo Berrettini said. "It would be like saying that a journalist writes worse articles because he has a wife and children. It is something that does not make any kind of sense, does it?”
Matteo Berrettini's girlfriend Melissa Satta read Andre Agassi's autobiography
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Melissa Satta further addressed the 10-year gap between herself and Matteo Berrettini, saying that she read Andre Agassi's autobiography Open to better understand the life of tennis players.
"I have a wealth of important experience, but he too has a great wealth of responsibility," Satta said. "There are 50-year-old men, I guarantee, who don't know what a commitment is. Being a tennis player at that level is a life of sacrifices. I didn't know it and I even read Andre Agassi's Open to understand it."
Berrettini is currently recovering from a grade 2 tear in his internal oblique muscle, an injury he sustained at the 2023 Monte-Carlo Masters. He skipped the Madrid Open and withdrew from the Italian Open a few days ago.
