In his will, Prospero Moisè Loria (1814-92) requested an autopsy and cremation and left his large inheritance to the municipality of Milan to establish a secular philanthropic institution, the Società umanitaria, "to enable all the disenfranchised poor, without distinction." Loria and other Italian Jews were at the heart of secularist activity in Italy's culture wars, as demonstrated by their engagement with secular philanthropy, battles for cremation, and Freemason activity. By exploring Loria as the most generous nineteenth-century Italian Jewish philanthropist, along with his affiliation with the Alliance israélite universelle as a secular Jewish institution in the Mediterranean, this essay shows how forms of secularism and Jewishness could coexist for Italian Jews and how secularism in Italy could include a commitment to a Jewish collective, and thus seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the composite mixture of secular Italians and to a discussion of Jewish secularism in an international context. KeywordsJewish secularism · Philanthropy · Freemasonry · Alliance israélite universelle · Liberal Italy and the Mediterranean 4 Stefania Licini, Guida ai patrimoni milanesi: Le dichiarazioni di successione ottocentesche Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

No abstract

With a focus on art donations, this article explores several case studies of Jewish Italian patrons such as Sforni, Uzielli, Sarfatti, Castelfranco, Vitali, and others who supported artists of movements that were considered modern at their time: the Macchiaioli (1850-1870), the Futurists (1910s), the Metaphysical painters (1920s), the Novecento group (1920-1930s), and several post WWII cases. It reflects on differences in art donations by Jews in Italy and other European countries, modes of reception, taste, meanings and strategy of donations, thus contributing to the social history of Italian and European Jewry and the history of collections and donations to public museums.

Our life with Ezio and Memories of War, written by Flora Aghib Levi D’Ancona traces the life of her husband Ezio Levi, a Jewish Italian philologist and hispanist, their experiences of exile in the US where the couple fled after the racial laws. Completed with a historiographical introduction and an appendix of unpublished letters, the volume traces Ezio’s path as a Jewish intellectual in Fascist Italy, his role as a cultural mediator of Spanish contemporary literature to Italy, the trauma of the racial laws, and the challenges of the American exile. Expression of a women’s exile literature, the pages reflect the authors experience as a mother writing for her children left in Italy and of an intellectual Italian Jewish woman dealing with the challenges of exile and memory.

Through an analysis of the art collection and patronage of Margherita Traube Mengarini (1856–1912), a German scientist and woman activist of Jewish origin in Rome, this article explores the dynamics of German–Jewish art collectors’ networks active in Italy from the 1880s to the early 1910s, with a particular focus on women. The collection assembled by Margherita and her husband Guglielmo Mengarini included both antique pieces – discovered during the excavations for the couple’s houses in Rome and in Anzio – and paintings of the family, commissioned from contemporary artists. The article discusses the Traube Mengarini collection in context, by focusing on the artists, collectors and intellectuals in their salon, and by comparing both their collection and networks with those of other Jews of German origin in Rome, men and women.