Something apposite to tomorrow evening’s talk on the Jews of Italy.My wife’s five times great-grandfather was a Solomon Vita de Isaac Rietti (1700-1758). A member of Bevis Marks Synagogue, Rietti came from an Italian Jewish family that were apparently originally from the town of Rieti in central Italy. We don’t know when exactly Solomon came to London, or where in Italy he or his father Ishac are from. We do know that he married Grace de Elihezer Moravia from Livorno at Bevis Marks Synagogue on 26 November 1732 (8 Kislev 5493).The Bevis Marks records show that on the same day, Grace’s sister Cara married a Gabriel Treves. According to the late Dr Lionel D. Barnett, the scholar who compiled the index of Bevis Marks’s collection of ketubot, this indicated that Treves and Rietti had sent to Livorno for brides and that these two sisters had responded and come to London for that purpose. In his footnotes to a fascinating article on the journey of Joseph Solomon Ottolenghi from kosher butcher in Italy to Christian missionary in Georgia, USA (but that is another story), B.H. Levy notes: “If that is true, Treves would have had to contact the Jewish community at Leghorn [Livorno], the officials of the Leghorn community would have had to find two young women willing to move to London and marry two men they had probably never met, the two young women would have had to have made all the arrangements for a permanent move to a foreign country, prepare suitable clothing, etc. for their weddings and arrange for passage to England, all of which would have certainly taken many months.”I have always assumed that Moravia was an Ashkenazi family name. So, how did Grace and Cara end up on the list of suitable brides of the Livorno congregation? And how did they come to be matched to two gentlemen belonging to the Sephardic community in London?If anyone has the Ketubbot Registers of the Jewish Nation of Livorno, would they mind looking up to see if Elihezer Moravia or other members of that family appear? Were there any Rietti in Livorno at the time (say Solomon’s father Isaac)?