Peter Vassallo Italian Culture Versus British Pragmatics: the Maltese Scenario
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Peter Vassallo Italian Culture versus British Pragmatics: The Maltese Scenario At the beginning of the twentieth century, Italian and Italian culture domi- nated the Maltese cultural scene. Most educated Maltese families (the cul- tural elite) spoke Italian fluently among themselves. Italian was the un- disputed language of the law courts, the university, and of legal documents.1 The perception of most educated Maltese was that Malta was a Latin country only sixty miles away from southern Italy. Culturally and geographically most Maltese considered themselves to be Southern Italians. Of course, Mal- tese as a language was also spoken but was considered to be a local dialect (some considered it an Arab dialect), useful for expressing strong emotions, and it was generally associated by the intelligentsia with the language of the kitchen. In the early nineteenth century, there was hardly any Maltese literature to speak of. Dun Karm Psaila, who was to become the Maltese national poet, first composed his poems in Italian (in the early twentieth century). Most of the poems in his Foglie d’Alloro were written in Italian in the manner of the established Italian poets of the time, Foscolo, Monti, Carducci and Pascoli, before he was persuaded by a literary friend (in 1912) to write verse (for a limited readership) in Maltese. Well before the advent of fascism, Italian was the language with which the educated Maltese felt a cultural affinity, Maltese being unintelligible to foreigners. In the sphere of trade, it had become, as Joe Cremona maintains, a lingua franca in the central Mediterranean and along the Barbary Coast.2 Young Maltese artists were awarded scholarships to study in Rome. Italian was the language in which merchants conducted their busi- ness (furniture, pottery), lawyers defended their clients, and civil servants issued bandi (public proclamations). Incidentally, it was in Malta that Cole- ridge taught himself Italian since, at the time, in 1804, he was public secre- tary, responsible for the issuing of bandi in Italian under his signature. In the perception of the Maltese elite, Italian was a sort of talisman pro- tecting them from the incursion of English, the language of the overlords, the 1. For a detailed account of the Maltese language question see Geoffrey Hull, The Malta Language Question: A Case Study in Cultural Imperialism (Valletta: Said International, 1993). 2. Joe Cremona, ‘“Acciocché ognuno le possa intendere”: The Use of Italian as a lingua franca on the Barbary Coast in the 17th Century. Evidence from the English’, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 5 (1997), 52–69. 172 Peter Vassallo British, who had been asked to help the Maltese after they revolted against the French in 1798 and who had stayed on as protectors or friendly colonial administrators, reluctantly allowing the Maltese a limited amount of self- government.3 Significantly, Italian was the language of the Roman Catholic Church and from the Maltese ecclesiastics’ point of view, English was the language of Protestantism and, as far as they were concerned, the less the British penetrated the social and cultural domain the better. For most edu- cated Maltese in the 1920s and 1930s, Italianità was a convenient banner of resistance to British anglicisation policies. Earlier, in the 1850s, British Malta had been a refuge for the Risorgimento liberals, where they found many sympathisers. The Maltese were regarded as Italians outside Italy by virtue of their ‘fede, costumi, educazione e lingua’ and Malta itself as the ‘ultimo sasso d’Italia’. The Italian exiles were grateful for the accoglienza they received on the island. Gabriele Rossetti, who fled to Malta in 1821, devoted a stanza of his poem La Vita Mia to ‘florida Malta, piccola ma bella’ which ‘fra l’inquieto mar […] dimora,/ d’italo genio e d’araba favella’.4 It is worth not- ing that among the distinguished political refugees who found asylum in Malta were Francesco de Sanctis, Luigi Settembrini, and Francesco Crispi, known affectionately as ‘il signor Cikko’. Giuseppe Garibaldi visited Malta twice on his way to and from London (in 1864) and was fêted by local aristo- crats with strong liberal sympathies, especially by the Marchese Ramiro Barbaro di San Giorgio and the Baronessa Testaferrata Abela. His note of gratitude (Valletta, 24 March 1864) mentions the ‘fraterna accoglienza’ of the ‘brava populazione maltese’.5 Francesco Crispi was later to become Premier of Italy in 1887 and passed the ‘legge Crispi’ which defined the people of Malta (like those of Corsica, Trieste, Dalmatia) as Italiani non regnicoli (Italians not belonging to the Kingdom of Italy but enjoying the rights of residence in Italy).6 The Gover- nor General Sir Charles von Straubenzee was understandably dismayed by the increasing tendency on the part of the Italian politicians to Italianise the Maltese. Contact with the liberal spirit of the Italian political exiles made the Maltese aware of their own rights and civil liberties and, as a consequence, the leading politicians applied pressure on the British authorities to grant 3. See Dominic Fenech’s perceptive analysis of this issue in Responsibility and Power in Inter-War Malta: Book One, Endemic Democracy (1919–1930) (San Gwann: Publishing Enterprising Group, 2005), pp. 4–6. 4. See Hull, p. 18. 5. See Hull, p. 20. 6. See also Lorenzo Schiavone, ‘Esuli Italiani a Malta durante il Risorgimento’, in Echi del Risorgimento a Malta, ed. by Vincenzo Bonello and others (Valletta: Società Dante Alighieri, 1963), pp. 185–186. .