His friend Slowacki answered them in some taunting verses, and this led to a quarrel between the poets.
He couldn't imagine any childhood taunting that would have caused him to crawl into the earth through a cold, wet, and black hole.
That Barbaro was really the first to apply the lens to the camera obscura is supported by Marius Bettinus in his Apiaria (1645), and by Kaspar Schott in his Magia Universalis (1657), the former taunting Porta with the appropriation.