Lorenzo Da Ponte

Dear visitor, I was an intellectual, best known as Mozart's librettist, who arrived in Gorizia in 1779 after being banished from the Republic of Venice. There, I had been accused of "public concubinage" and "kidnapping a respectable woman," charges aggravated by my having been ordained a priest just six years earlier. I fled to Gorizia, then Austrian, and immediately fell in love with this city. When I was called to Dresden as court poet in 1781, in fact, I left my second homeland with great regret: "All that night I wept at the mere thought of having to leave a city where I was treated so well by all the good people and where I sometimes came to respect myself."