Tennis player Matteo Berrettini is opening up about his split from girlfriend Melissa Satta.
“Melissa Satta and I are no longer together,” Berrettini, 27, said in a statement to The Sun on Sunday, February 25. “What I can say is that we had a beautiful, intense relationship, we have great respect for each other. I won’t go beyond this, I don’t like sharing my private life too much.”
He continued, “Nothing special happened. I must thank her for this period we lived together very intensely despite all the difficulties of the case.”
“We spoke to each other, we exchanged telephone numbers and from there we started talking,” she said. “The next day we both left, my life is in Milan, he lives in Monte Carlo.”
Satta added that the twosome had “a thousand chats on WhatsApp” which “never ended,” saying, “I’ve met people over dinner and exchanged numbers, but things often end the same way they started. Not with Matteo: if we are still here it is because we managed to meet … in various cities.”
A few months after bringing their romance into the spotlight, Berrettini suffered an abdominal injury, leading him to miss the Italian Open in May 2023.
“I have been holding on to the hope of being able to compete in Rome, a tournament that means so much to me and where all my dreams started. However my latest scan results show I still need at least a week before I can start training physically again,” he wrote via Instagram in April 2023.
Fans theorized that his injury resulted from sex. Satta later took to social media to address those claims and said she faced “insulting, bullying and sexist messages” online.
“I choose to be a public figure, and I accept being exposed and exposing myself on social media, but I’m just trying to have a romantic relationship with another person, I just want to try to be happy too,” Satta said via Instagram in April 2023, per Vanity Fair Italy. “I’m a normal girl and I live a normal life out of the spotlight, why should I be accused because my partner is having a difficult time in his job?”
When Vanity Fair Italy asked about the injury, she replied: “It’s a shame that it’s an injury at the same point as the one in 2021, when I didn’t know him. But in any case: do I really have to answer to these people?”