According to Pietro Perolari-Malmignati (writing in 1869), the Maltese language lacks words apt to express scientific, artistic or literary concepts. The Maltese inhabitants he exchanged views with had no regard for their spoken language at all.
He had scarcely met any young native person who had ever read anything in Maltese. Books in that language remained on the shelves, except for the Catechism, and this because the Church promoted it vigorously, and (Ludovico Mifsud) Tommasi’s hymns, pushed by the Bishop – the Augustinian Gaetano Pace Forno.
The Maltese inhabitants, on the other hand, had a fair command of Italian, as the language generally used for teaching, by the courts, the government, the merchants, the theatre, the Church and the press. Most Maltese then used exclusively Italian for writing. The British had tried repeatedly to drive Italian out and substitute it with English but, faced by the massive opposition they encountered, their insistence never met with any success.
Very recently, a third-rate author (uno scrittorello qualunque), almost certainly the dentist Carlo Casolani (1815-1898), dazzled by a bag of gold sovereigns the colonial owners had dangled in front of his greed, had written in favour of ditching Italian and putting English in its stead. His proposal had attracted massive opprobrium, and his pamphlet (printed both in London and in Malta) “ended as wrapping paper lining the weighing scales of grocers”.
Among themselves, the Maltese spoke their own tongue, for the same reason that many Italians consider it a sign of affectation and snobbery to speak the national language rather than their regional dialect. But once the conversation falls on a higher intellectual subject, they switch to Italian, or insert so many Italian words in their native Maltese that an Italian would get the drift of the discussion anyway.
The author found that the Maltese spoke Italian quite well, except for their inability to cope with the nuances of tu, voi and lei – neither their barbarian native language, nor English, have the rich finesse of address Italian has.
Just imagine: an Englishman will call his son, his servant and his dog “you”! Same with God and excrement, always “you”. And then, how the Maltese abuse the adjective grazioso. Anything remarkable is grazzjus, whether a ship, a palace, a child or a painting.
Britons in Malta lamented how poorly the Maltese pronounce English. But then, how many Englishmen pronounce English properly, he asks?
The pious English ladies, who used to see Perolari-Malmignati at the Anglican church services, fondly believed that he had reneged the idols of the Catholic abomination, and used to ask him, at the hotel table – between one mouthful of roast beef and the next – how well he had followed the sermon. They also recommended he should not attempt to imitate the clergyman’s pronunciation. They found it almost impossible to believe the Archdeacon had been educated at Oxford – poor Rev. John Cleugh, Doctor of Divinity, not with that accent.
The native Maltese seemed to have a natural propensity for languages. You will find among them those who speak French, Greek, Arab or Russian. One could see this as their way of asserting their superiority over the British settlers, who hardly spoke even their own language intelligibly.
The Maltese generally dismiss the British as ‘stupid’. These silly, ethnic, racist generalisations, the author concludes, should only be luxuries permitted to oppressed peoples.
However gifted the Maltese were reputed to be at picking up foreign languages, Perolari-Malmignati recounts a ludicrous incident about the capitulation of the French garrison in Gozo after the popular uprising.
None of the French officers spoke Italian, and none of the Gozitans spoke French, so the parley on the terms of surrender must have been rather stilted. The belligerents resorted to almost macaronic Latin and finally came up with a one-line agreement: Honores, proprietates et religionem habebitis majorem. Possibly the most succinct surrender treaty in the history of warfare.
Good story, but sadly one totally fictitious which some prankster had duped Perolari-Malmignati into swallowing. The terms of the capitulation of Gozo had, far more prosaically, been drafted by Horatio Nelson personally. Fables which eventually pass off as ‘history’ sometimes originate this way.
This book is at its strongest when recording old customs and traditions, today mostly obliterated from the collective memory. Some funerary rituals which the author mentions had, by then, already waned out of fashion, like the women mourners (newwieħa) who, for a tariff, wailed their grief throughout the burial ceremonies, the higher the fee, the louder the moans.
But these bereavement professionals had other funerary services on special offer, provided the retainer was sufficiently attractive. They blackened doors and windows with soot mixed in water, smashed flowerpots, cut down vines and chopped the tails of horses – all proof of irriversible mourning. Within living memory, some horses drawing funerary hearses still had their tails tied doubled up to make them appear short.
This book is at its strongest when recording old customs and traditions, today mostly obliterated from the collective memory
Perolari-Malmignati reproduces parts of two wills, one drawn up in 1487 in which the testator orders his wife and children not to cut off the tails of his horses or to engage in any loud rituals after his death. By the second will, dated 1543, the heirs were prohibited from blackening the doors and windows of the owner’s house when he entered the afterlife.
Then there were the carinzie – large gatherings of country folk who went around at night singing in front of the homes of the wealthy. If the owner threw money at them they would paint a white cross on the door; if not, they broadcast the owner’s stinginess by painting a black one.
But the misers eventually defeated the mercenary troubadours. They ordered that, first thing in the morning, their servants should erase the black cross and paint a white one instead. The givers, realising that generosity and meanness anyway both ended up with a white cross, stopped giving money – and thus the carinzie died out. Different writers give different versions of the qarinza, which apparently typified New Year’s Eve in the countryside.
Perolari-Malmignati also writes a lot about the parata and carnival, which I will not repeat, as ethnographical researchers already have plenty of data on these well-known subjects. Disguise as a moor topped the list of favourite carnival costumes, mostly because of its simplicity and budget price: a white sheet over your body, a rag wrapped round your head in the form of a turban, the skin turned black with coal dust, and voilà, the perfect moor. No hysterical black-haters back then.
When once a Governor tried restricting the use of costumes in Carnival, violent riots had broken out, and that taught the British raj not to meddle with old-established traditions. Today’s carnival regulations, Perolari-Malmignati adds, only ban costumes with political undertones, and regulate the size of sugar-almond confetti – to avoid them becoming missiles of mass destruction.
During carnival, only the foolhardy would consider not wearing a costume and a mask – those who did not, risked being manhandled and exposed to public ridicule, even by their closest friends, like Perolari-Malmignati, who shied from joining the bedlam and was rewarded by watching his hat being battered and crushed.
A parallel carnival that has now changed its name, was the so-called ‘carnival of women’, held in the last days of Lent and the Easter vigil. For that occasion, all the women of the household dressed in black and, accompanied by their menfolk, similarly in black, visited several churches in the surroundings. Sadly, what should have been a mystical experience sometimes turned into one fine excuse for women to meet their lovers – smiles, tender words and some lewd groping too, in between one holy sepulchre and the next.
During Perolari-Malmignati’s times, one could assume that all the religious vari would have been carved in wood, and men viewed the right to carry them in procession as a coveted privilege inherited from father to son, an envied distinction which not infrequently ended in violent brawls and knifings, all devoutly dedicated to the saint’s glory.
The lucky bearers crouched under the base of the statue, hung all around with a curtain that reached the ground. As the carriers were in the dark and unable to see anything outside, a supremo who shouted directions at those inside walked with a strong sense of purpose in front of the big moving skirt, feeling like Benito Mussolini leading the March on Rome.
Some men could be seen in religious processions dragging very heavy chains from their ankles. Mariners who had escaped drowning after praying to some particular heavenly intercessor when their life hung by a thread, often vowed to wear chains in public cortèges in atonement for their sins. They then fulfilled the promised vow with a public show of penance and humiliation (chains at the feet stigmatised slaves and convicts) in gratitude for a divine intervention.
To avoid the perils of the sea, others preferred to carry on their person an imprint in white wax of one of the coins Judas received to betray Jesus; churches distributed these on Holy Saturday, and also vouched for their usefulness to ensure stress-free childbirth. Perolari-Malmignati could not resist the ultimate anti-papal jibe: if those coins still exist, they should be sent to Pius IX, the right recipient for Judas’s money.
No wonder Perolari-Malmignati’s book instantly “disappeared” from the Maltese public. Unconsciously killed by very conscious oblivion.
The shipwreck of St Paul in Malta, on which Perolari-Malmignati dwells at some length, gives him the occasion to single out the apostle for some high-minded praise, but also for some cheeky irreverence.
With ill-concealed scepticism he recounts the story that, whatever the amount of stone removed from the Rabat grotto, the size of the cavern always remains the same, as if new limestone grew to replace the one removed.
A marble inscription recorded the miracle and made sure everyone knew about it. Now that the Suez Canal has been cut, he asks impudently, would it not be a good idea to build a causeway linking Malta to Sicily? Where to find all the stone required? From St Paul’s grotto, naturally.
Perolari-Malmignati dedicated the last chapter of his book to the politics of Malta. I cannot help the feeling that he planned this to be the programmatic climax of his work and that, in reality, the contents of this chapter had always been the political agenda he wanted to push most.
Although a strong sympathiser of the British and of British institutions, he describes the government of Malta as “quasi despotic”, and dismisses the presence of elected representatives in the Council as “a bitter mockery”.
The Maltese delegates there were in a minority, so the colonial diktat always prevailed.
“Had the Maltese more political maturity, they would refuse to elect representatives, who only benefit the government, giving it the appearance of being liberal.” He dismisses the “liberties” granted by the British – like the jury system, the freedom of the press, of religion and of association – as irrelevant. What use can they serve, when you are denied the right to govern yourself?
Perolari-Malmignati dedicated the last chapter of his book to the politics of Malta. I cannot help feeling this chapter had always been the political agenda he wanted to push most
The author repeats what so many other foreigners had observed before him: the Maltese despised their government, but more than that, they felt outraged by the contemptuous, supercilious behaviour of the British towards them. Just no rapport existed between the two communities, and the frigidity that hindered all communion between the rulers and the ruled stared everyone in the face. The British had been in Malta for 69 years, and yet they remained so ignorant about anything Maltese that they gave the impression of only having landed yesterday.
On the other hand, he adds, the Maltese had not yet discovered a love for their own country – the smallness of their ideas corresponds to the smallness of their land, their reverence for the clergy, “a most damaging class universally condemned by all civilised peoples”, their indifference to Italy, sadden those Italians who come to Malta. Many, but not the majority, sympathise with Italy, and consider a union with the mother country preferable to being the vassals of a foreign power.
He analyses the reasons why integration with Italy was not favoured by the majority: principally the distressed financial situation of the mainland, but also the outcome of the latest battles, the weakness of the Italian navy, and mostly the designs to remove the Pope from his precarious throne, had the effect of causing the larger part of the Maltese to lose sympathy with Italy.
The clergy in Malta, fearful of the curtailment of their privileges, and the government, fearful of a strong nationalist spirit, conspired to sow hate against the new united Italy, mostly by portraying it as the sordid persecutor of the Catholic faith.
The detractors of Italy in Malta had received help by “hordes of Italian reactionary priests and monks who had fled Italy after the unification, and painted themselves as victims of persecution”. The Maltese clergy loathed these clerical refugees, but still, hypocritically, forged a common front with them.
Perolari-Malmignati does not hide how confounded he felt about Malta seeing itself as a “nation”. What? With a population of 100,000, with no written language, no literature, no history of its own, how can it ever aspire to be accepted as a nation? If Malta, why not Gozo, Pantelleria, Ischia and Elba? All nations? Even the liberal Stuart Mills, in his Considerations on Representative Government, excluded the right of self-determination for small territories.
Then a final, fiery peroration to the Maltese people: “Does England care about you, O Maltese, or does it care about your harbours and your fortifications? Woe on those who disregard the ties that unite them to their mother country (Italy). Is not history there to attest to the fact that Italy has at all times showered you with its benefits?
“Persisting in rejecting Italy, you are condemning yourself to servitude. The determination to break chains is what gives strength to slaves. If you desire to be free, freedom will be yours. All the fleets of England will not be sufficient to prevent this. With the poet you will sing ‘He wanted freedom, and his enemies melted away’”.
In his adieu to Malta, at the very beginning of the book, he fixes his gaze with poetic emotion on St Elmo’s lighthouse when departing from Grand Harbour. He salutes the Maltese people he is leaving behind: “With sadness I distance myself from you, as I leave you cold and indifferent towards the great country, towards your mother country. Could you bear for so long a foreign domination and the yolk of the priests without suffering a waning of your love for the mother country and your love for freedom?”
Perolari-Malmignati has a whimsical vision of a greatness still awaiting Italy. But not before “pierced by the shafts of liberty, the pontifical tiara will have tumbled down that Vatican most despicable”, a future time when all difference between a geographical Italy and a political Italy will have been annulled. He had only a few months to wait for that to come about.
Hmm. Bit over the top. But almost endearing from a teenager, much too earnest for his own good, not to say unashamedly opinionated. One who already felt entitled to have the world as his audience.
Knowingly or not, the young Perolari-Malmignati must have been among the first to advocate Malta’s integration with mainland Italy, a political programme that never really caught on in Malta and, in Italy itself, took off much later.
It was only with the advent of the strutting jingoism of Fascist Italy more than 50 years later that Malta irredenta became a battlecry that strayed from romantic rambling towards a precise political agenda. In Malta, a policy of integrating the island with Italy never found many adherents, and a professed irredentismo always remained peripheral to mainstream political parties.
While the defence of the centuries-old cultural italianità of Malta featured on the forefront of the manifesto of nationalist movements, the political italianità of Malta was never promoted by any political party. That is, until 1963, when Dom Mintoff started negotiating in earnest with Italian politicians his request for Malta’s integration with Italy.
A few months after Perolari-Malmignati left Malta, the Papal States fell, to become the final piece in the jigsaw of a unified Italy. On December 3, 1869, Perolari-Malmignati graduated in laws at the University of Padova. He then joined the infant Italian diplomatic service and held consular office in Marseilles, Beirut, some South American countries and finally in Paris. His last post was as Consul for Italy in Trebizond, Turkey, in February 1886.
He must have been very active during the diphtheria epidemic that raged in Cairo in 1883 and Toulon the following year, as he was twice decorated for his work related to those lethal outbreaks. He was a knight of the Crown of Italy and of the dynastic order of the Savoia, that of St Mauritius and St Lazarus.
Perolari-Malmignati took his own life, aged 38, on July 16, 1886, in Toulon, France. His posting to far-away and backwaters Trebizond he considered an affront, and this was blamed for his tragic death. He had shown signs of insanity, which were attributed to the diphtheria he had contracted during his efforts to relieve those stricken by the dreaded disease. In a surge of acute depression, he took advantage of a moment when he was not being watched, and took a flying leap from his window.
Newspapers that did not tow the official line savaged the government for its callousness and insensitivity in dealing with a man of integrity and high intellectual achievements.
He left behind his young widow “a provincial journalist, a worthy and good woman” who kept a low profile in diplomatic circles. This wifely failure to push did little to further his career.
Acknowledgements:
My thanks to Dr Salvatore Schirmo, director of the Italian Cultural Institute, Dr Roberto Pascarella of the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Dr Pier Luigi Bagatin, director of the Lendinara library and Dr Manuela Belardini who helped me in my researches.