Few stories capture the cultural bridge between Italy and the United States as well as the one that begins in the early nineteenth century with Lorenzo Da Ponte. The man who wrote Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte for Mozart emigrated to America, kept a grocery in Pennsylvania and became the first professor of Italian at Columbia. Along the way he brought Italian opera to New York, transplanting an entire culture into a country that had not yet met it. Even his name seems chosen for the part: in Italian, Da Ponte means “of the bridge.”

Born Emanuele Conegliano in 1749, to a Jewish family in Ceneda, today Vittorio Veneto, he took his new name from the bishop who baptized him when the family converted to Catholicism. He arrived in America in 1805, at 56, after a restless life between Venice, Vienna and London. To support his family he opened a grocery in New Jersey, and when that did not work he tried again in Pennsylvania, with no better luck.

The turning point came in 1807, in a bookshop at 123 Broadway. Da Ponte had come in looking for Italian books. A young customer, overhearing him, observed that the great Italian writers could be named on the fingers of one hand. Da Ponte answered that he could spend a month listing them. The young man was Clement Clarke Moore, the future author of “The Night Before Christmas.” Struck by the stranger, he introduced him to his father, the president of Columbia College.

Thanks to the Moores, Da Ponte began teaching Italian to the sons and daughters of New York’s elite families. He imported Italian books by the crate, and 264 of them went to Columbia’s library. In 1825, at 76, he became the college’s first professor of Italian. The post carried no salary, and his students paid him directly.

The following year, at his urging, the company of the Spanish tenor Manuel García staged Don Giovanni in New York, the first complete performance of the opera in America. His students were among the few in the audience who could follow the Italian words. In 1833 Da Ponte founded the Italian Opera House, the first theater in the United States built for opera. It lasted only a few seasons, but the audience it had created stayed, and fifty years later, in 1883, the Metropolitan Opera opened its doors.

Da Ponte died in New York in 1838, at 89, and what he had carried across the ocean took root. Every season the Metropolitan Opera stages the works he wrote with Mozart. At Columbia his portrait hangs in the Casa Italiana, and since 1929 the Italian department has had a chair that bears his name.

When Da Ponte arrived, almost no one in New York had heard Don Giovanni. Today the city knows it by heart.