Teresa Bagioli Sickles - Early Years

Early Years

Born in New York City in 1836, Teresa Da Ponte Bagioli was the daughter of the wealthy and well-known Italian singing teacher Antonio Bagioli (1795–1871) and his wife, Maria (or Eliza) Cooke (1819–1894). (Maria was the adopted and alleged "natural" child of Lorenzo Da Ponte.) During her youth, she sometimes lived and studied in the household of her grandfather, Lorenzo da Ponte, the noted music teacher, who had worked as Mozart's librettist on such masterpieces as The Marriage of Figaro. An exceptionally bright child, Teresa spoke five languages by the time she was a young adult.

Da Ponte's son, a New York University professor, befriended the teenaged Dan Sickles and helped secure him a scholarship to the University. Young Sickles also moved into the Da Ponte home; he left after about a year when his mentor suddenly died but maintained close ties with the family, possibly to continue the study of French and Italian. Though Sickles had known Teresa since her infancy, he made her acquaintance again in 1851, this time as an Assemblyman (and part of the Tammany Hall Democratic machine). He was thirty-three years old, she was fifteen.

Sickles, a notorious womanizer, was quite taken with Teresa and soon proposed marriage. Despite his prominence and long connection to the family, the Bagiolis refused to consent to the marriage. Undeterred, the couple wed on September 17, 1852, in a civil ceremony. Teresa's family then relented and the couple married again, this time with John Hughes, Catholic Archbishop of New York City, presiding. Some seven months later, in 1853, their only child, Laura Buchanan Sickles, was born.