Many viewers of the movie Amadeus would understandably get the impression that Mozart felt extreme antipathy for all Italians. Like all Hollywood films based on historical figures, this one exaggerated one aspect of historical fact to make a dramatic point. In this case, as usual, the reality is more complicated. Certainly Mozart completed intensely with the Italian composers, who after all had been dominating the feild of opera for generations. Nevertheless, perhaps Mozart's greatest collaboration was with an Italian, Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Professor Da Ponte wrote the Libretti (lyrics) for three of Mozart's greatest operas: Le Nozze Di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutti. Da Ponte was in Vienna because he had been banished from Venice where he had written poetry that offended the local authorities. Once in Vienna he had been appointed the Poet to the Court Theatre of the Hapsberg Emperor.

Da Ponte was born in 1749 in Venice to a Jewish family. When he was fourteen his widowed father remarried a Catholic woman, and the entire family converted to Catholicism. Before he was exiled from Venice he received an excellent education in the seminary, where he became fluent in Hebrew and the classical languages. He eventually became a professor and then Vice Rector.

When Mozart died in 1791 Da Ponte was dismissed by the Emperor. He spent the next several years traveling about Europe writing, translating and eventually running a rare book shop. He ran into debt in London which forced him to escape to the United States before he could be arrested for debt, a common practice in Europe at the time.

Da Ponte spent some twenty years bouncing from one failed business to another before he was recommended for a teaching position at Columbia University (then Columbia College). He was appointed professor at Columbia in 1825 to teach the other great Italian writers such as Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto and Metastasio. He became the founder of Italian literature studies in the United States.