Tony Bennett left a piece of his heart in Boston, too

After enjoying three decades restored at the top of his form, Tony Bennett died Friday following several years of decline due to Alzheimer’s disease. Bennett would have turned 97 on Aug. 3.

Loprete remained in close contact over the years with Bennett and his son, Danny, who managed the singer’s business affairs. He accompanied them to the Super Bowl, to Abbey Road Studios in London, and to the White House for a Fourth of July celebration.

“He was the cool uncle,” said Loprete. In fact, Loprete appeared as one of Bennett’s “sons” in his 1992 TV special “A Family Christmas.”

“I never met anyone who loved life more than him,” said Loprete. “I’ve been dreading this day.”

Around Boston, many of Bennett’s friends and admirers mourned the loss. Radio legend Ron Della Chiesa and his wife, Joyce, first met Bennett about 40 years ago. When Bennett’s daughter Antonia came to the city to study at Berklee College of Music, she often stayed with the Della Chiesas at their home in the South End.

On the day of his friend’s death, Della Chiesa wore a Tiffany watch Bennett gave him around the time of Antonia’s graduation from Berklee.

“It’s engraved on the back: ‘Thanks for everything. Love, Tony,’” Della Chiesa said.

These days the longtime Boston radio fixture hosts a weekly program, “Strictly Sinatra,” from 9 p.m.-midnight Sundays on WPLM 99.1 FM. This week’s show will be a tribute to Bennett.

“There’s Tony Bennett, and then there are other singers,” Della Chiesa said. “There are lots of Sinatra imitators, but nobody imitates Tony Bennett.”

Pressed to elaborate, Della Chiesa noted Bennett’s Calabrian heritage.

“His father used to get up in the mountains and sing from the top of the hill,” he explained. “Tony grew up listening to opera, Enrico Caruso, and what the Italians call bel canto. He could sustain a note longer than just about anybody.”

Bennett performed with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall in 1977, the first of six appearances there. He was also a regular with the Pops at Tanglewood, appearing nine times beginning in 1991. His final billing there, with his close friend and admirer Lady Gaga, occurred in 2015.

Tim Ray, a Berklee professor who joined Bennett as his piano accompanist around 2016 and was soon appointed his musical director, noted that Bennett was a particular fan of female jazz singers who were fluent improvisers — Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan.

By the time Ray auditioned for Bennett, the singer was showing some effects of Alzheimer’s, though he had not yet gone public with the diagnosis. “But his presence, his voice, and his command of the audience were always top-notch,” Ray said. “I still marvel at that.”

For years, Bennett typically closed his shows by setting down his microphone and singing without it.

“Most singers would never think to sing without a microphone,” Ray said. “Even in his 90s, he could, absolutely.”

Loprete recalled accompanying Bennett for an appearance at Carnegie Hall. During soundcheck, Loprete climbed to the fifth-level balcony of the renowned venue as his friend put the microphone down.

“And he yelled up, ‘Hey ChaChi, I’m gonna try ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’” Loprete remembered. “You could hear everything. People loved it when he put the microphone down.”

Bennett’s band late in his career featured several musicians with Boston ties, including guitarist Gray Sargent and bassist Marshall Wood. Wood’s wife, the singer Donna Byrne, was a favorite of Bennett’s. She often served as his opening act. “It doesn’t get any better than this,” he once said of her singing.

“He couldn’t have been nicer,” said Bill Hanney, who owns the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly. Bennett played there several times beginning in the 1990s, including a 2014 appearance a few years after Hanney bought the venue.

“He worked the room like a 25-year-old,” Hanney recalled. “Out of all the people we’ve had perform, he’s probably tops on my list. When I had the opportunity to book him, I grabbed it. It wasn’t cheap, but guess what? It was worth every penny.”

“It’s almost the end of an era for his style of music,” said Maggie Scott, who recently retired as a Berklee professor after a long run in the voice department. She mentored Antonia Bennett and has remained in touch with the family.

“You could always understand his lyrics, and he always sang in tune,” Scott said. “And his choice of songs was always positive. Whatever he chose to sing had a positive tone.”

Best known for several signature songs, including “Rags to Riches,” “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” “Stranger in Paradise,” and “The Best Is Yet to Come,” Bennett suffered his mid-career drought in part because he refused to record the bubblegum pop songs of the ‘60s, as many of his contemporaries had. Della Chiesa recounted a story about Bennett’s mother, Anna, a dressmaker who once told a customer that she couldn’t make the elegant wedding dress the woman wanted for her daughter because — it being the Depression — she could only afford to work with “chintzy” material.

“She taught me never to use cheap material,” Bennett said.

Della Chiesa and his wife considered themselves privileged to be in attendance for one of Bennett’s final shows, in 2021, at Radio City Music Hall.

“The music was the last thing to go,” Della Chiesa said.

Besides that engraved watch, he cherishes the sketches Bennett, a devoted painter, made of the couple and gifted to them.

“Sooner or later we’d get to talking about the Italian Renaissance,” said Della Chiesa. “He’d say, ‘These modern guys are all right, but look at Raphael and Michelangelo. How did they do it?’”

James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.