Up for auction a VERY RARE! "Italian Banker" Adriano Lemmi Clipped Signature Mounted.
ES-4299
Adriano Lemmi ( Livorno , April 30, 1822 - Florence , May 23, 1906 ) was an Italian banker .
He was an Italian patriot and politician, very close to Giuseppe Mazzini, whom he had met in 1847 in London,
where Lemmi lived in voluntary exile, dedicating himself to trade. In 1849
he was in Rome to contribute to the defense of the Roman Republic . On
behalf of Mazzini he then kept in contact with Luigi Kossuth , hero of the Hungarian revolution, who
accompanied him to London and the United States of America . Lemmi
was involved in the failed Mazzinian attempt of February 6, 1853 and, to escape
the consequences, repaired in Switzerland , and subsequently in Constantinople . He remained in contact with Mazzini
and in 1857 financed the expedition of Carlo Pisacane. In 1860 together with the banker and
brother-in-law Pietro Augusto Adami ,
also from Livorno, he founded the Adami e Lemmi company to which Garibaldi granted the
concession of the railway network in the South and also of the
tobacco monopoly in Naples . Lemmi, a Mason from 1875, was elected to the highest office
of Grand Master of
the Grand Orient of Italy on
January 17, 1885 and was the great commander of the ancient Scottish Rite
and accepted until his death . He succeeded
where his predecessors had failed, or to reunite, under the labaro of the Grand Orient of Italy ,
all Italian Masonic obedienceswhich,
for various vicissitudes, had remained hitherto autonomous. The grand
master also reorganized the GOI finances. He sensed the importance of having a
"covered" loggia at his disposal, in which to bring together the most
influential masons of finance and publishing. Lemmi's line of action, very
attentive to the conquest of power, has been repeatedly compared to the
"philosophy" that inspired Licio Gelli a century later. A parliamentary commission of inquiry,
promoted in 1892 by the deputies of Imbriani and Achille
Plebano, accused Lemmi of having illegally concluded a contract in his name, to
the detriment of the state treasury, since it was entered into three years
before the beginning of a bearish cycle of prices on the New York Stock
Exchange and against a security reduced from 20 to 5%. Francesco Crispi rejected the investigation and
prohibited the display of the documents, while the parliamentary documents had
now been disclosed in the Catholic and non-Catholic press. The tobacco
scandal and the Marseille trial seriously damaged the public image and moral
credibility of the Italian Masonic body, causing Lemmi to take action in a
program of speeches and rallies throughout Italy to recover the ground lost in
the masses. The concessions were after many contrasts confirmed by the
Kingdom of Italy, Shortly after the newly constituted Savoy
government, having revoked the convention, transferred the concession deed
to the Vittorio Emanuele Society (mainly
French capital) ; but the subsequent events then saw the intertwining
of initiatives of French bankers and finally of a company created by Count Bastogi who had founded the Italian
Society for the southern railway tracks . Adami and Lemmi
were cashiers of the Mazzinian Action Party to which Garibaldi had opened the
doors of the South. Strongly secular and anti-Catholic, Lemmi's statement remains
famous: "The disappearance of the temporal power of the popes is the most
memorable event in the world". Lemmi's permanence at the top of
Freemasonry coincides with the leadership of the Italian government by Francesco Crispi . Lemmi and Crispi were linked by
close friendship and commonality in domestic and international political
choices. Inside the masonry, after 1896, the year of the fall of his
friend Crispi, he was left only with the office of sovereign great commander
of the Scottish rite ,
which he kept until his death in 1906. His son Silvano (1857-1901) joined his
father in trade and was briefly deputy.