Ernesto Nathan

Ernesto Nathan was born in London on 5 October 1845, the son of Mayer Moses Nathan, a German-born Jewish businessman naturalized in Britain, and of Sara Levi Nathan, an Italian Jew from Pesaro in whose house Giuseppe Mazzini, the prophet of Italian unity, lived as an exile and whose children he helped to raise; Nathan was Jewish by both parents, and though he was a freethinker rather than an observant Jew, his enemies never let Rome forget it.

He moved to Italy after his father's death, edited Mazzini's writings, became an Italian citizen in 1888, and was twice Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, the country's principal masonic body, from 1896 to 1904 and again from 1917 to 1919. In 1907 a coalition of liberals, radicals, republicans and socialists — the blocco popolare — elected him mayor of Rome, the first Jew and the first non-Catholic to govern the city of the popes since Italy had taken it in 1870, and he governed it for six years: he built schools and opened dozens of kindergartens, fought the real-estate speculation that was devouring the capital with a master plan of 1909, and created the municipal electricity and transport companies that still serve Rome.

His speech of 20 September 1910, on the anniversary of the breach of Porta Pia, which criticized the Vatican's hostility to the Italian state, caused an international incident and the wrath of Pius X. He resigned in 1913, volunteered for the front in 1915 at the age of seventy, and died in Rome on 9 April 1921; his sister's marriage into the Rosselli family made him a great-uncle of the anti-fascist brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli.