Camillo Cirelli (whom Verdi had met while a student of Lavigna's some years before) was one of a group of three theatrical agents under Lanari who took responsibility for Strepponi from Milan after the early months of 1837. He also engaged her for the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice, but it was not uncommon for her to work under other impresarios. However, she became pregnant around March/April 1837 and she stopped singing only about a month before her first child, Camillo Luigi Antonio was born in Turin in January 1838 and baptised as "Sterponi" (sic). From her performance records of these two years, Frank Walker corroborates the fact that she was absent from the stage for about three months, and then began another hectic round of performances under an exclusive contract with Lanari announced in February 1838. Cirelli believed that he was the father, although Frank Walker states that he proved to be a very good friend and that "it is possible that he had been Camillino's godfather, and given him his Christian name". However, sometime in the Spring of 1838, Strepponi became pregnant again and, in Florence on 9 February 1839, she gave birth to her second child, Giuseppina Fausta, only a few hours after completing a performance at the Teatro Alfieri and before leaving for an engagement in Venice. The child was placed in the turnstile for abandoned infants at the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence under the name of "Sinforosa Cirelli". These children were known as the esposti, "the exposed", or as described by Phillips-Matz, "society's trash". Cirelli, who had returned to Milan, initially denied paternity, believing that she had taken another lover. But Cirelli then accepted paternity when the child was born prematurely and there was no time for her to be taken to somewhere private for the birth. In late 1838, Lanari and Bartolomeo Merelli, the impresario of La Scala, had negotiated for Strepponi, Moriani, and Ronconi to appear in La Scala for the following spring season, but they had both been horrified to find out in early January that she was five months pregnant, and that this would cause her to be unavailable. But in February 1839 in Florence, she sang in Il giuramento with such dramatic intensity that it appears to have caused her to miscarry and, by necessity, withdraw from further performances for some time. Increasingly pressured by Lanari, she finally relented