The Jew Ernesto Nathan is elected mayor of Rome, supported by a reformist, secular, and staunchly anti-clerical bloc. It is an event that seems legendary and revolutionary: Nathan was not only a Mazzinian, Jewish, Freemason, and republican, but had only recently acquired Italian citizenship and still spoke his native English, his mother tongue, with a strong accent. His father, Moses Meyer, was born in Frankfurt in 1799 and later moved first to Paris and then to London, where he met Mazzini several times from 1837 to 1848 and thereafter. From London, Mazzini coordinated a dense revolutionary and republican political network. Ernesto grew up at the heart of this transnational, republican, anti-monarchical, and anti-clerical patriotic network. A fervent interventionist, Ernesto later volunteered in the First World War. He later became Grand Master of the Grand Orient and died on April 9, 1921.
