Sarina Nathan née Levi

Sarina Nathan was born in Pesaro, Italy, and there married Moses Meyer Nathan, a German stock agent. They moved to London in the late-1830s, living initially in the Aldgate area, but by the early-1840s at 58 Myddelton Square, Clerkenwell. Over a twenty-year period, until her husband’s premature death, she had twelve children.

This did not get in the way of a very full life as a political activist. In London in the 1830s she met Giuseppe Mazzini, the architect of Italian unification who was living in exile here. She quickly became his devoted disciple and a generous supporter of the long-running cause.

In due course, as the children grew up, she returned to Italy to be nearer the action, which was gaining ground in tumultuous times throughout the middle decades of the 19th century. This was risky for her. The unification movement was regarded as seditious by the various powers controlling what were then eight separate states in the Italian peninsula. She came to the attention of the authorities, was charged with conspiracy, and had to flee to Lugano in Switzerland to escape arrest. She could not return to Italy until 1871, the year unification was finally achieved – surely an extraordinary moment for her.

She died back in London, but her body was taken to Rome for burial. Had she lived longer, she could have seen her Clerkenwell-born son, Ernesto, elected in 1907 as the first left-of-centre Mayor of that city.