Lorenzo Da Ponte

Born and educated in Milan, Italy, Samuel Mazzuchelli (1806-1864) began his American ministry in 1828 at Mackinac Island, a center of the fur trade. Building churches, organizing schools, and preaching in both French and English, he traveled the Mississippi and the Great Lakes over long distances and in all seasons. After 1839, he continued much of his work in Iowa as a vicar-general to the bishop of the newly-created see of Dubuque. Mazzuchelli eventually founded both a men’s college and a teaching convent, the Congregation of the Most Holy Rosary, in Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, and extended the Church’s outreach within Native American communities. In 1849, Mazzuchelli relinquished many of his administrative responsibilities to become the priest of the parish at Benton, Wisconsin, where he also served as director of the novitiate and school opened by the Sisters of the Congregation of the Holy Rosary. Mazzuchelli’s Memoirs are divided into three sections: the first focuses upon missions among Native Americans and Canadians in Wisconsin and Michigan; the second deals with missions among Catholic and Protestant immigrants in the territories of Wisconsin and Iowa; and the third is a disquisition on the present and future state of Catholicism and Protestantism in the United States. Although spiritual matters are the principal concern, the memoirs also convey much about the Upper Midwest’s political life and early community institutions. – Summary from American Memory site.

anthology of erotic passages in classic literature

Opera based on Beaumarchais' sequel to his Barber of Seville.

"Plot and counterplot lie at the heart of Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte, and The Marriage of Figaro, the three libretti that Lorenzo Da Ponte prepared for Mozart. They were also central to Da Ponte's own extraordinary life. His Memoirs record a fantastic variety of romantic, political, and professional intrigues, and tell of meetings with a host of remarkable men. In a life that took him from the canals of Venice to the streets of New York, Da Ponte was at different times priest, professional gambler, proprietor of a bordello, political agitator, court poet, impresario, grocery-store owner, and the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. His Memoirs, a minor classic of Italian literature, are the picaresque and engrossing story of a man of enormous talent and unsurpassed flair who was, above all, an indefatigable survivor."--BOOK JACKET.