Castelnuovo and Enriques were both from families of high cultural status and strong civil values. Guido Castelnuovo’s maternal grandmother, Adele Levi della Vida, an educator, opened the first Froebelian kindergarten in Venice in 1869; his father Enrico was a patriot, a novelist and director of the Scuola Superiore per il Commercio in Venice; his maternal uncle Luigi Luzzatti was an outstanding economist and politician. Similarly, Federigo Enriques’ father, Giacomo, was a wealthy merchant and his mother Matilde Coriat came from one of the most prominent families in the community of Livorno. Both families were non-practising Jews. Guido and his sister, Federigo and his sisters and brothers were all registered as Jews but they did not follow any religion. Enriques had an attitude somewhat analogous to that of C. Segre, a religious sense of mathematical research, which he conceived—in some sense, a legacy of the Talmudic tradition—as an acute logical criticism, a creative drive, and a tension towards the discovery of truth. Castelnuovo could have written what his uncle Luzzatti, a theorist of freedom of science and conscience, had written to Bishop Bonomelli: