How sad to go to all the trouble of writing and publishing a book, and no one then seems to have noticed it or heard of it.

That happened to a volume about Malta printed in 1870, and today totally, but totally, ignored and erased from everyone’s memory.

This was the fate that stalked Pietro Perolari-Malmignati, the author of Alcune occhiate a Malta, which, in my view, deserved a far kinder fate.

I have not, so far, met anyone at all who was aware of that book. I have never seen it mentioned or quoted by any other author, not even the keenest Melitensia enthusiasts with every arcane source of our past at their fingertips.

Not that it qualifies as a memorable book, one of those incendiaries that set the course of human events on fire. It has ample added value nonetheless. If for no other reason, because almost all 19th-century memoirs about Malta are in English, by British or American authors – and a few, like Puckler-Muskau, in German, together with a small number in French and Spanish.

This one, almost exceptionally, is in Italian, and it provides a curious, unusual perspective on Malta and the Maltese by an intelligent observer – a teenager really – long before Italy started noticing that it had any political and emotive interest in Malta.

So far, I have been unable to establish with certainty what the author was doing in Malta during what must have been his quite protracted stay on the island. I know he left our shores on March 28, 1869.

Quite likely, he may have chosen Malta for political asylum, as he had taken part in the ill-fated campaign of the Agro romano of 1867 for the military conquest of the Papal States, planned by Giuseppe Garibaldi volunteers and defeated by the combined Papal and French forces at Mentana in November 1867. He had been personally introduced to Giuseppe Mazzini by his friends Alberto Mario and his English consort Jessie ‘Hurricane Jessie’ White, leading figures in the Risorgimento. Or, possibly, he had come to Malta to improve his English.

A substantial number of Italians were seeking refuge in Malta then. A painful and often violent process of unification had taken over the fragmented Italian mini-states, and by 1869, that long and bloodied journey had almost reached its destination – only the Papal States then still resisted, with intransigent opposition, the national unification. In 1870, the year Perolari-Malmignati published his book, the liberation armed forces finally entered the city and captured Rome. The Italia unita dream of the patriots had come true at last.

From the second quarter of the 19th century, Malta had turned into a hotbed of Italian political intrigue and initiative. Two bitterly opposed factions found refuge in the island over the years.

The first waves comprised the political refugees who rebelled against, or had anyway come to harm with the old autocratic regimes: the liberals, the democrats, the patriots who saw Mazzini, Garibaldi and Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, as the prophets of a free, strong and united Italy. Probably, more of them homed on Malta than anywhere else – because of the vicinity and the sympathy for the Risorgimento shown by the majority of Britons.

But after that, when the old monarchies and other undemocratic Italian regimes started crumbling, it was the turn of their reactionary supporters to flee to Malta, to escape retribution from the new democratic masters, or simply because they felt unwelcome in the young liberal state they had resisted and opposed. Malta first swarmed with the pro-unification liberal refugees, and later with the anti-unification monarchists, reactionaries or conservatives.

The lists of Italian political refugees in Malta do not, so far, seem to include Perolari-Malmignati, but it would be strange were it to be just a coincidence that he repaired to Malta after the defeat of the Garibaldi forces in the battle of Mentana in which he had taken part.

Perolari-Malmignati, son of Paride and Marianna Cogorani Picinali, was born in Lendinara, close to Rovigo and Ferrara in the Polesine, on June 16, 1848, from noble ancestry – the Perolari and Malmignati palaces still have pride of place in those lands.

He must have been about 19 years old when he came to Malta and when he wrote his book. A student of law at the University of Padua, he graduated soon after his return to Italy from Malta. Although taken up by a full-time diplomatic career, he became a prolific author and poet. He died tragically.

I believe I still have to discover more about Perolari-Malmignati, but his writings show compellingly that he fitted squarely in the patriotic, liberal and anti-clerical groups that characterised some 19th-century Italians.

Though in his book he never confessed it explicitly, he may have converted, in Malta or elsewhere, to the Anglican or some other Protestant faith. He regularly frequented the services held in St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral – to brush up his English pronunciation, he claims.

He also praises unconditionally the Anglican gospel societies which disseminated the Old and New Testaments in Italian for everyone to read.

Most of all, he advertises his loathing for the temporal power of the Pope – the last remaining obstacle on the way to the unification of Italy, an impediment that military action overcame immediately after he published his book on Malta.

He never claimed to be atheist or even anti-religious, but loudly anti-clerical and viciously against the Papa-Re. The book festers with anti-Church sentiments. One example: Pope Innocent VIII who had struck a fruitful deal with the Hospitaller Knights in Rhodes, he calls “the commercial firm Innocent VIII, without the & Co”.

He sniffed Popish influence everywhere in Malta. The public library only subscribed to two Italian periodicals: the Civiltà Cattolica and the Unità Cattolica. The librarian (Dr Cesare Vassallo) had the reputation of being quite a bigot. Works which the Inquisition had placed on the Index of Prohibited Books he had marked on the frontispiece with a red cross.

Next to the doorway of the University building in Valletta, formerly the Jesuit college, could still be seen two holy water stoups. When lectures finish, he says, that gate “vomits throngs of seminarians (chierici), filthy and greasy, who leave behind them an odour, which is surely not that of sanctity”.

Students who did not pursue religious studies struck him as hardly better: “they are young men brought up between the skirt of their mother and the cassock of their confessor. Few dare have liberal opinions, and those few will speak about them timidly and in the lowest voice.”

Even the Maltese dgħajjes which plied the harbours caught his eye as evidence of religious superstition. Their owners invariably painted them green, and the boats had an inscription on either side. While one would be a humorous motto like ‘Let them blab’, the other would be a solemn religious slogan ‘The providence of God’ or ‘Evviva for ever Pius IX’.

Perolari-Malmignati fitted squarely in the patriotic, liberal and anti-clerical groups that characterised some 19th-century Italians

Perolari-Malmignati visited Cospicua on its feast day – probably December 8, when the city celebrates the Immaculate Conception. On one of the houses in that city flew the Papal flag, yellow and white, with a writing on it in praise of the controversial Mastai-Ferretti pontiff: Viva Pio nono. He enquired who the owner could be and discovered he was one who had made a fortune selling holy medals blessed by the Pope.

He explains the historical origin of these medals: in the 16th century, the Protestants in the Netherlands used to wear a medal with the image of the king, and the Catholics started wearing medals with the effigies of Christ or of the Madonna.

When the Pope came to know of this from Margaret of Parma, the illegitimate daughter of Emperor Charles V and ruler of the Netherlands, he insisted on blessing them – “a new object of devotion for the faithful and a new source of revenue for the agents of the Church”.

Differently from many (not all) British observers, Perolari-Malmignati had, overall, a positive, sympathetic view of the Maltese in general, and felt passionately for the colonial constraints under which their liberties agonised. We do not know who the Maltese he mixed with were – whether those who forged a paltry career by sucking up to their colonial owners, or the Maltese liberals, the reformists, the incipient nationalists.

Being close to the Anglican community in Malta, one would think he frequented the anglicised Maltese, rather than the patriotic discontents. He certainly had British friends on the island. But in Malta, the political equation suffered major distortions: while the British colonial establishment strongly resisted any liberal measure in favour of the Maltese natives, it generally and generously supported the Italian adherents to the Risorgimento in their fight for national unity and freedom.

The only Maltese VIP Perolari-Malmignati mentioned by name as his friend was Baron Augusto Testaferrata Abela (1826-1885), a passionate lover of the theatre and personally not a high-profile political figure on either side of the divide, though some indications point to his siding with the Italian liberals. His wife, the Baroness Angelica, on the other hand, had a most prominent role to play in the controversial welcome of Garibaldi to Malta in 1864. The iconic hero of the Italian Risorgimento thanked the Maltese for their (far from unanimous) reception through an open letter addressed to her.

Perolari-Malmignati did not have a very high regard for the patriotism of the Maltese. “Those few Maltese who care to say they love their native land proclaim Scerri (Dun Mikiel) and Mannarino (Dun Gaetano) national heroes. But would you believe it? While on every parapet of the bastions of Valletta you will see monuments to English soldiers and generals, not a single tablet commemorates the memory of the two martyrs.

“That is not enough: the family of Mannarino, after he was imprisoned, did not even accept to carry on using his surname. Faced with all this, what can be said of the patriotism of the Maltese?”

The Occhiate would not pass off as a guide book, though it contains quite a lot of information useful to the visitor – we could hardly speak of tourists then. Nor would it count as Perolari-Malmignati’s autobiography of his stay in Malta. More than anything else, as its clumsy title hints, the book builds up a mass of observations on Maltese history, customs, politics, folklore and life in general.

The ‘guide book’ content, though secondary, warrants some looking into. “The Italian postal ships sail twice a week for Palermo. Being small, they do not offer a very regular service. They take nine hours to cross from Syracuse to Valletta.” He praises the new Royal Opera House, much more frequented by British servicemen than by the local gentry – always full of red uniforms, he notes. He condemned the humiliating custom that saw the singers, on their benefit night, going round the boxes holding a tray and soliciting alms.

The Manoel Theatre did not stage opera, but drama and comedies. In one play on the passion of Christ, Pontius Pilate received a standing ovation – for washing his hands of the crucifixion of Jesus. With a population one quarter of what it is today, the island already struck Perolari-Malmignati as terribly overcrowded. While Italy had 85 inhabitants to the square kilometre, Malta had 795!

The colonial government had still not paved Main Guard Square then – because army officers wanted to review the troops on horseback every week, and a hard surface would have been unwelcome to their steeds.

The Malta museum, housed in the Public Library, impressed the author – it compared well with others. “If all countries had been so diligent in collecting antiques as they did in Malta, archaeology would not have suffered from so many gaps.”

Probably this work is at its most valuable in its emphasis on Maltese customs and folklore, an outlandish subject which seems to have attracted the Perolari-Malmignati’s inquisitiveness.

Interest in native ethnographies, though hardly unknown in the 1860s, seems all the same quite pioneering. The teenaged author has two splendid anecdotal studies on the widespread Maltese faith in the ħares, and in the waħx.

“More than in God and in the Saints, the Maltese countryman believes in the ħares and in the waħx”. He urged Victor Hugo to settle in Malta – wasn’t it he who called superstitions “the daughters of religion and the mothers of poetry”?

This work is at its most valuable in its emphasis on Maltese customs and folklore, a subject which seems to have attracted Perolari-Malmignati’s inquisitiveness

He recounts at length and with evident gusto the stories told by Ġużeppi ta’ Firjol and Franġisku ta’ Faqqajsa about personal experiences everyone in the country claims to have had with the ħares. On the waħx, he records what Pawlu tal-Pariġin and the stone mason Ferraru had gone through crossing that paranormal boundary.

Perolari-Malmignati, though obviously plotting a safe distance between himself and these superstitions, never puts on condescending, dismissive, or mocking airs like some of his contemporaries did when taking about the odd creeds of the Maltese countryside – rather one of affectionate, bemused curiosity.

Although beliefs in the ħares and in the waħx dominated the people from the countryside, others hardly held them in contempt. Dun Ġwann of Mdina made a public profession of his persuasion. He asserted, without allowing room for doubt, that the really serious burglars recited the Credo in reverse and pronounced some prohibited words from the cabal which, as a good Christian, he refused to repeat. They made use of this formula to silence the guard dogs and then rob to their hearts’ content.

Perolari-Malmignati finds this a good moment to throw Schopenhauer at us: religions, like fireflies, need the darkness to shine. In Malta, he had counted 350 edifices dedicated to religion, and 1,500 between priests, monks and nuns. The Maltese had even thought it indispensable to build a church on the tiny island of Filfla – literally a peppercorn.

Rarely have I read anything so vivid about the old popular beliefs of the Maltese, commented upon by other foreign observers too, both before and after Perolari-Malmignati. I may be wrong, but it does not seem to me that any of our valiant folklorists and ethnographers, including Ġużè Cassar Pullicino and Tarcisio Zarb, had mined the rich treasures of this authentic recording of hands-on fieldwork.

On Napoleon in Malta, Perolari-Malmignati heaps praise for his liberal reforms: “Bonaparte further decreed the liberty of the press, instituted a national guard, suppressed the convents and laid down plans for the establishment of primary schools. The cultured and liberal inhabitants of the city welcomed these reforms with joy, but the populace and the clergy embittered themselves even further when the despoliation of the major churches and of the palaces of the knights was put in effect.”

On the French order that burials should not be distinguished by religion, he quotes the Maltese author Antonio Zarb, this time mockingly: what! Catholics buried next to Jews, with the Muslims, and perhaps even the heathens too! That was just too much for our good old Zarb to stomach. He wanted divine apartheid after death too. Perolari-Malmignati found Zarb’s indignation hilarious.

History knows all too well Napoleon’s reluctance to leave Malta in the hands of the British. According to Perolari-Malmignati, Bonaparte is recor­ded as having uttered: “I do not want them to have two Gibraltars in the Mediterranean, one at the entrance and the other at the centre.”

Perolari-Malmignati dedicates a whole chapter to the Maltese language, and on this subject he hardly tries to hide a strong national bias. Musical Italian words immersed in the harsh and guttural sounds of Maltese he likens to bright flashes of lightening which illuminate the darkness of the night.

He tries to explain the Semitic origin of the language spoken by the Maltese through a rather dicey historical assertion: with the capture of Malta by the Arabs, a large part of the population migrated to Constantinople. Following that, Malta only traded with Sicily, the Barbary Coast and Spain, all countries dominated by the Arabs.

Today, some of his observations on the language sound unacceptably dismissive, but almost corresponded to the truth at the time: “Maltese has no literature, no grammar, nor has it an alphabet.”

Vella (Francesco) and Vassalli (Mikielanton) had tried their best to forge a Maltese alphabet from the Roman script, but a number of native sounds had no correspondent there, so in the end they had to invent some additional letters. Others resorted to distorting the Latin script to a point that it became unreadable.

Others still, like Bellanti (Giuseppe), Dr Genesius (Wilhelm) and Sacy (Sylvetre de), actually used the Arabic alphabet. The Reverend Schlienz (Christoph Friedrich) admitted it was impossible to write Maltese according to the rules of the Arab grammar and dictionary, as no one would then understand it. Though still a young lad, Perolari-Malmignati had done his homework thoroughly – he knew the works of all the early pioneers of Maltese studies.

Perolari-Malmignati admits how advantageous it would be for the Maltese to learn Arabic; no one, however, wanted to listen. The Lyceum held the only classes, but there were years when not a single student chose to attend the course.

Had Malta been governed by the Maltese themselves rather than by foreigners, Arabic would not be so neglected in the island, he adds. The Maltese traded mostly with Europe, so they believed a smattering of spoken Arabic to be sufficient, they told him. Were the Maltese to learn Arabic as a literary language, they would make fortunes working as interpreters for Europeans in the East.

To be concluded.