Lorenzo Da Ponte
Lorenzo Da Ponte was Columbia's first professor of Italian literature, teaching in the early decades of the 19th century. Born a Jew in Venice, he was converted to Roman Catholicism and studied for both teaching and the priesthood. Failing at both, he moved to Vienna and Dresden, where he became a noted librettest. Perhaps his crowning achievement in life was writing the lyrics for several Mozart operas.
Following this period, however, he moved on to financial insolvency in London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, where he ran failing grocery and book-selling businesses on the Bowery, and playing the organ at St. Patrick's Cathedral, before running into Columbian Clement Clarke Moore, who offered him an "honorary" (i.e. unpaid) job at the College. De Ponte thus became the first Columbia faculty member who was born Jewish as well as the first to be ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. He was also the first in America to lecture on Dante's Divine Comedy. His accounts suggest he neither managed to interest Columbia students in Italian nor early New Yorkers in opera.
Like many other individuals whose connections to Columbia are dubious at best, his name is endlessly and tirelessly invoked when it suits us and ignored when it doesn't.
A professorship in Italian in his name is currently held by Teodolinda Barolini.
