A LEGENDARY Italian playboy has died aged 63 while having sex with a 23-year-old tourist.

Maurizio Zanfanti, dubbed the Romeo of Rimini, slept with more than 6,000 women after becoming famous as a nightclub promoter in the beach-side city in the 1970s.

7 Maurizio Zanfanti suffered a heart attack Credit: Rex Features

He was entertaining a tourist from Romania in the back of a car on Tuesday night when he suffered a fatal heart attack.

The shocked woman called paramedics but could not be revived.

Local media said it was the way the man once called “Italy’s most successful lover” would have wanted to go.

“Zanza died after doing what he did best — loving women,” Il Resto Del Carlino, a Bologna newspaper, reported.

7 He claimed to have slept with 6000 women Credit: Rex Features

7 Zanfanti began work persuading female tourists to come into a nightclub called Blow Up Credit: Rex Features

7 He boasted he would sleep with 200 women in a season Credit: Rex Features

The mayor of Rimini said Italy had lost “a legend of the night”.

Zanfanti started his illustrious career aged 17 in 1972 while working for a nightclub called Blow Up.

His job was to chat to mainly German and Scandinavian tourists in the street and persuade them to come inside.

With olive skin, long, flowing locks and hairy chest, he had little difficulty.

7 Zanfanti said he scaled down his activities in recent years Credit: Rex Features

7 He rose to fame during the 1980s when he was profiled by the media Credit: Rex Features

7 Zanfanti with his trademark leather jacket and hairy chest Credit: Rex Features

He boasted that in a successful summer in his prime he could sleep with around 200 women.

Zanfanti spent his winters in Scandinavia working for tourist agencies.

His exploits became so famous that some of his lovers erected a wax statue of him in a Swedish town.

Zanfanti also become the subject of media profiles and in 1986, Italian newspaper L'Espresso named Zanfanti "Italy's most successful lover."

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He claimed to have once seduced a French journalist who was interviewing him.

Two years ago he was a guest of honour at a Rimini nightclub when a group of Swedish women who had visited in the 1980s flew in for a reunion.

In his final interview with German newspaper BILD in 2014, he announced his retirement and said: “At 59, I'm getting too old for it.”

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