Adeodata Pisani a Mystic Nun in Mdina

Adeodata Pisani A Mystic Nun in Mdina

Peter Serracino Inglott

Edited by Petra Caruana Dingli

Photography & Design Daniel Cilia Acknowledgements

Tanks are due, ﬁrstly, to the family of the late Rev. Professor Peter Serracino Inglott for granting permission to access his papers. Te encouragement and advice of Dr Louis Galea, former minister of education and friend of Father Peter over many years, was also vital to this publication. Abbess Maria Adeodata Testaferrata de Noto at St Peter’s Monastery never lost hope that Father Peter’s work on Adeodata Pisani would see the light of day. Without her personal commitment, this project would certainly not have materialized. Mgr Carmel Zammit, Bishop of Gibraltar, provided the monastery with his valuable support throughout. A special mention must go to Margaret Zammit, Father Peter’s dedicated personal secretary, and to the late Annabelle Vassallo, who had helped him draf and amend his ever-changing script at diferent stages over the years. More recently, several persons played a role, large and small, in helping this volume ﬁnd its way. Tanks are due to Ranier Fsadni for providing valuable background and insights; to Dr Mary Ann Cassar for helping to locate the latest script; to Mgr John Azzopardi (known to all as Dun Ġwann) at the Wignacourt Museum in Rabat, Richard Cachia Caruana and Prof William Zammit for historical information; to Dr Sarah Galea; and to Mary Samut Tagliaferro at the University of Malta library. Te assistance of Brian Bonello and Veronica Mercieca during numerous visits to the monastery is greatly appreciated. Tere are surely many other persons to whom Father Peter would have liked to express his gratitude, and to acknowledge their role in the creation of his text. On his behalf, sincere thanks is hereby extended to them all. Petra Caruana Dingli July 2018

First published in 2018 by St Peter’s Monastery, Mdina © St Peter’s Monastery, Mdina Text © Te Authors Photography & book design © Daniel Cilia except pages 4, 5, 8, 24, 130, 199, 201 – photos supplied by the editor, page 11 & 102 – plan supplied by the Vatican All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the publishers.

Printed in Malta by Gutenberg Press Ltd., Gudja Road, Tarxien, GXQ 2902, Malta

ISBN 978-99957-1-344-7

Photo front cover: Adeodata Pisani’s room at St Peter’s Monastery, Mdina. Painting endpapers: Adeodata Pisani as novice mistress – St Peter’s Monastery, Mdina.

ii iii Contents

Preface ...... iv Carmel Zammit

Introduction: Visiting St Peter’s Monastery ...... 2 Petra Caruana Dingli

A Teological Reﬂection on Maria Adeodata Pisani: A Mystic Nun in Mdina ...... 14 Hector Scerri

On the Shoulders of Sanctity ...... 22 Ranier Fsadni

Writings on Adeodata Pisani by Peter Serracino Inglott

Dialogue with an Heiress – Te Secret Life of a Maltese Nun: Adeodata Pisani (1806-1855) ...... 28

Is-Soru ta’ L-Imdina – Oratorju f’Ħames Partijiet ...... 171

Appendix – Maestra di una spiritualità inclussiva ...... 191

References ...... 192

Index of Names ...... 197

Biographies ...... 199

ii iii Preface When Fr Peter Serracino Inglott approached me to express his desire to write an in-depth and comprehensive biography of the life of Blessed Maria Adeodata Pisani some years afer her Beatification by Pope John Paul II in 2001, I have to admit that I was quite surprised but at the same time very enthused with the sugestion. I was aware that Fr Peter was a man who had encyclopaedic knowledge of most topics under the sun. But I never imagined that he would be interested in writing a biography of a female Maltese Saint, since I was not sure whether he had tackled such an enterprise before. At the same time I was sure that once he put his heart and mind in it the product will be supreme. One of the reasons that might have spurred Fr Peter to take on this venture might have been the fact that the present Mother Abbess, Sister Maria Adeodata Testaferrata de Noto, who is a distant relative of the Saint, was well known to him as a young child, since both lived in the same area in Tarxien. More important, Fr Peter was also very much attracted to monastic life. Due to circumstances best known to himself, he never actually embraced this vocation, but through his simplicity and humility he in fact practiced the monastic vocation ‘in spirit’. It did not take Fr Peter long to visit, with his secretary, the Benedictine monastery dedicated to St Peter in Mdina, where Blessed Maria Adeodata had spent twenty-five years as a Benedictine nun. He picked up the material he needed from the library in the monastery. A couple of books had been published about the life of the Blessed nun, mainly referring to facts about her life without any reflection or interpretation of these facts. A source for this biography was the spiritual diary that the Blessed had written, called Te Mystical Garden. But the main source was the Positio Super Virtutibus, which is a detailed compendium of all the evidence that was collected about the Saint’s life during the process of Beatification and Canonisation which examines the way the Blessed lived in a heroic way the theological and cardinal virtues.

iv v Tis Positio was studied by a number of Cardinals in the Congregation for the Causes of Saints before recommending that a Decree declaring Maria Adeodata Blessed was signed by the Pope. Reading through this material, Fr Peter applied his vast knowledge about human nature, psychology, philosophy, the various spiritual influences on the Blessed, the history of the time and of the Benedictine order, and many other considerations which make this biography a treasure of knowledge applied to simple facts revealed about the Blessed Benedictine nun. Although Fr Peter declared in his preface not to let his imagination slip away from what is implied by the witnesses, his reflections depict a man who can be poetic and an artist in drawing pictures which bring to life all the colours that make this biography so gripping and informative. Reading through the narrative, one keeps discovering treasures of information which arise from simple facts or phrases used in the testimony about the saint. Whether it is a physical attribute about the saint, her way of behaving, her parental influences and other aspects that arise, Fr Peter makes the simple grow into an extraordinary insight into the spirituality of this saint which makes this biography such a pleasure to read.

Carmel Zammit Bishop of Gibraltar 16 July 2018, Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel

Introduction

Visiting S Pete’ s Monastey in Mdna Petra Caruana Dingli

n 14 September 2001, I visited St Peter’s Monastery in Mdina with Peter Serracino Inglott. He was writing about Adeodata Pisani (1806-55) and I was helping him with some of the research. We spoke to Abbess Maria Adeodata Testaferrata de Noto, and viewed the rooms upstairs Oin which Maria Adeodata Pisani had lived. She had been beatified by Pope John Paul II during his visit to Malta four months earlier, on 9 May 2001. During that visit, Fr Peter was especially interested in examining the lace and beautiful embroidery that she created, and which is still preserved at the monastery. It was typical of Fr Peter to never be satisfied with his writings or consider them to be complete. Unless his scripts were wrenched out of his hands due to unavoidable deadlines, he would continue adding and changing phrases and paragraphs, with no end in sight. In 2001, we had already obtained quotes from printers and drafed a list of illustrations with a view to imminent publication. Yet he continued improving and expanding the text, intermittently, for another seven or eight years. In the meantime, I had lost touch with the book’s progress. Unfortunately, he never quite finished it before he passed away in 2012. I resumed contact with the monastery and the drive to publish his biography of Adeodata Pisani was renewed. An attempt was made to identify the latest version of the text. Afer extensive searches, what is published here is - Visitors book in Adeodata Pisani’s room at St Peter’s Monastery, recording visit by Peter Serracino Inglott, Petra Bianchi (Caruana Dingli), and Margaret Zammit on 14 September 2001.

2 IntroductIon

an edited version of the most mature and recent script of Dialogue with an Heiress that could be found, which dates to 2008. Tis volume also includes the oratorio text in Maltese, Is-Soru ta’ l-Imdina (Te Nun of Mdina), written by Fr Peter in 2001. His intention was that his old friend, the late Charles Camilleri (1931-2009) would set it to music. It is unclear whether this music was composed and, to my knowledge, no public performance ever took place. A brief essay on Adeodata Pisani, written by Fr Peter in Italian, is included in the Appendix. In addition, a theological appraisal of Heiress is presented in Hector Scerri’s essay in this volume, while Ranier Fsadni provides valuable insights into the ideas and the man behind the text. It is possible that Fr Peter may have wanted to add some more points to his scripts, or that he had some other papers or thoughts stashed away somewhere. As the original printing quotes show, he was planning to present his book on Adeodata Pisani as a fully-illustrated volume of around 200 pages. I hope we have done it justice here. If further material is ever found it will hopefully also be published, but we decided to go ahead as best we could. As Fr Peter’s good friend Dun Ġwann Azzopardi said to me, in any case, this script is a ﬁrst-class essay by a philosopher. More than a Biography

Peter Serracino Inglott’s research on Adeodata Pisani was mainly based on his close reading of the Positio. Tis is a series of testimonies of people who remembered Adeodata, together with other information gathered in the 1890s, some 40 years afer her death in the formal process leading to her beatiﬁcation.1 In his preface, he explains that as he read through the Positio he tried, ‘to extract as much as I could of the suppressed colour that there was in the various refractions of Adeodata’s personality in the prism of those who knew her personally.’ Yet he never let his imagination ‘slip away from the moorings of what is implied by the witnesses.’ Serracino Inglott not only draws on his deep knowledge of philosophy and theology, but also on history and literature. Heiress, the Secret Life of a Maltese Nun is much more than a biography of Adeodata Pisani. At times, he writes in a novelistic style, introducing dialogue and imagining situations and people as they might have been. His study of both the Positio and the Garden made him feel that he had ‘come to know her almost as I know my sister and that I have learnt as much from her.’

First page of Adeodata Pisani’s Mystical Garden of the Soul, in her own handwriting – St Peter’s Monastery, Mdina.

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Schema of Adeodata Pisani’s Mystical Garden of the Soul – diagram and handwritten text by Peter Serracino Inglott.

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He points out that Heiress is certainly not a hagiography, and neither is it an attempt to write a scientific-historic scrutiny in the manner of the Jesuit ‘Bollandists’. Some might conclude, he supposes, that the Adeodata Pisani which he wrote about never existed or that, like some saints, she is ‘an amalgam of reality and myth’. He wonders whether they might ‘attribute to my account of the Maltese nun just the sort of level of truth which fiction has.’ He insists, however, that ‘it is much more historically accurate than that.’ Heiress is peppered with literary allusions and references, including to Chaucer, Pascal, Voltaire, Diderot, Hopkins, Eliot and Beckett. It touches upon female figures from classical literature like Penelope, and particularly Calypso in whom Serracino Inglott had a special interest. Te early illustrations list for Heiress had also included Pre-Raphaelite images of nuns in convents, inspired by Victorian medievalism. Serracino Inglott was interested in literary scholarship exploring central female paradigms in the Victorian imagination. Besides studies by Marina Warner, he cites Nina Auerbach who analyses Victorian cultural myths of female figures such as old maid, fallen woman, domestic angel and nun, among others.2 From this perspective, diferent female identities present a clash between powerlessness and power. For example, in Heiress the depiction of Saveria, the unmarried poor woman in Mdina whom Adeodata knew, is based on this ‘old maid’ paradigm. Te old maid creates her identity through exclusion from normal family life. He imagines Saveria as a kind of heroine choosing life-long solitude and exposure to scorn, over female servitude and ‘a mediocre man who just happened to be available.’ He sugests that Adeodata, ‘saw in Saveria her ‘mother’ because it was a similar spirit that she felt flowing in her own veins, although her own call had been to a diferent style of life.’ Heiress weaves in many such threads from nineteenth-century literature and art and which were current in literary criticism, largely growing out of feminist theory, in the 1980s and ‘90s when his work on Adeodata Pisani was first conceived. Tis scholarly interest was closely related to the study of women in fairy and folk tales,3 and in this vein Serracino Inglott also approaches Adeodata’s relationship with her grandmother through the framework of the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Alongside Heiress, a complementary imaginative and artistic treatment of the subject is provided through the perspective of the oratorio Is-Soru ta’ l-Imdina. Only three characters in the oratorio are mentioned by name: Adeodata, her mother Vincenza, and the old woman Saveria her ‘alternate mother’. Te rest of the characters are types or groups: blind woman, baron, bishop, confessor, visitor, abbess, nuns, narrator, angels, grandmother, wolf, the Madonna, and ‘the opposition’. Te oratorio text sheds light on Serracino Inglott’s treatment of these figures in Heiress. For example, the grandmother and wolf are cast in deep

5 6 IntroductIon

male voices as basso and baritone, and grouped together in sequences inspired by Little Red Riding Hood. Serracino Inglott’s in-depth analysis of Adeodata’s mystical diary, which he called a ‘micro masterpiece of spiritual writing’, shifs between theological and literary analysis. As he studied the Garden, he drew a diagram in his notepad which illustrates the mental shapes he constructed around this work. He drew an exterior wall with a door leading to the inner part of the garden with its ﬂowers, noting its protection by a ‘double security system’. For him, Adeodata sought ‘to synthesize the Franciscan idea of total poverty and the Carmelite idea of mental prayer within the all-embracing Benedictine perspective of ‘seeking God’.’

Expanding the Biography

In his preface, Serracino Inglott duly notes that a full-scale biography of Adeodata Pisani still needs to be researched and written. Besides the Positio, he based his script on published biographical essays on Adeodata and there is no need to repeat those details here. I will take the opportunity, however, to flesh out some biographical gaps which may be of interest to readers, based on snippets of my own research and more recent visits to the monastery. Adeodata arrived in Malta from Naples in 1825 and settled in Rabat. She was 19 years old. Her father Baron Benedetto Pisani had already been in Malta for four years, but he first appears in the Rabat parish census in 1826 so it is probable that he moved to Rabat following Adeodata’s arrival. To date it was not clear where Benedetto lived in Rabat, however the Status Animarum of the parish reveals that from 1826 to 1830 he resided at Strada Concezione, moving to Strada San Francesco in 1831. He then lived in Strada Nuova (today Triq Cosmana Navarra), with his domestic servant Ignazio Borg, from 1833 until his death.4 Te town of Rabat in Malta in the 1820s had a total population of 4,500, with many parishioners living in hamlets dotted around the nearby countryside. Close to another 400 inhabitants resided in Mdina (with 50 persons at the seminary) which was included in the same parish. Adeodata did not live with her father in Rabat but stayed with close relatives, Daniele Bonici Mompalao and his wife Maddalena dei marchesi Apap.5 Daniele was her father Benedetto’s first cousin as their mothers were sisters, Elisabetta and Eugenia Mamo Mompalao.6 Daniele and Maddalena were well-to-do and owned several properties, including in Mdina, Valletta and elsewhere in Malta and Gozo, however their main residence was in Rabat. Adeodata lived with them for over two years. Te Status Animarum of Rabat notes that they resided in Strada Ribazza (renamed Strada Britannica in 1843, and today Triq ir-Repubblika) together with two domestic servants. Daniele died in 1840 however Maddalena continued to live

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Detail of Status Animarum of the parish of Rabat in 1827. Adeodata Pisani is noted as residing with her cousins Daniele and Madalena Bonnici in Strada Ribazza (today Triq ir- Repubblika). She is here listed under her baptismal name ‘Teresina Pisani’, and the margin notes that she was 20 years old. in Strada Ribazza. A recently identified notarial document reveals that they rented their home from Baroness Parisio Moscati.7 It is a relatively short street, but the exact house has not been identified to date. At various times, other members of Daniele’s family also lived in the same street. Due to scarce resources and unemployment, the lower classes in Malta experienced severe poverty at this period, in both urban and rural areas. Te agricultural produce of the island could not sustain the population, and by the first decades of the century Malta was also losing its cotton trade. A devastating plague in 1813 gave the island another sharp blow. Te British Governor of Malta, Lord Hastings, reported in 1824 that the lower classes in Malta verged on extreme poverty, with some almost on the brink of starvation.8 A British visitor to the island in the 1820s described the abysmal condition of the rural poor streaming into Valletta every morning, wearing rags and beging for bits of bread.9 It is in this context that Maddalena Bonici’s charitable acts are to be understood. It is said that she opened part of her house as a shelter for the destitute, and this concern must surely have influenced Adeodata when she stayed with her. Afer she joined the monastery, Adeodata was known for providing food to the poor who knocked at the monastery door. She refused to eat her normal meals, and would instead eat scraps and lefovers from the kitchen. Today she is ofen represented as holding a loaf of bread, symbolizing this aspect of her life.

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Another notarial deed describes the contents of Daniele and Maddalena’s marital home in 1841.10 Teir household belongings reflect the lifestyle of a prosperous nineteenth-century home in Malta, including numerous items of furniture, paintings, silver, linen, jewellery and clothes. Tese furnishings and objects would resemble those which Adeodata knew when she lived there, until she entered St Peter’s Monastery as a novice in 1828. A repeated theme of the oil paintings and watercolours hanging on Daniele and Maddalena’s walls was the Virgin Mary, with others featuring various saints and religious subjects, landscapes (vedute) and battle scenes. One veduta painting depicted the volcano Vesuvio in the bay of Naples, Adeodata’s native city. Adeodata’s parents, Benedetto Pisani and the Neapolitan Vincenza Carrano, had married in Naples in 1805 but separated the following year soon afer her birth. She lived with her Maltese grandmother Elisabetta in Naples until her death in 1816, and was sent to boarding school. Five years later, in 1821 Benedetto had to leave the city and return to Malta for political reasons, having supported a rebellion brewing against the authorities at the time. During the turbulent years of the Italian uprisings of the Risorgimento, Malta was a common refuge for those escaping political persecution in Italy. In the first half of the nineteenth century, English liberal policies allowed a steady flow of refugees to enter Malta relatively easily, and a small community of exiles flourished in Valletta. Troughout the varied episodes and battles of the Risorgimento, Britain gave refuge to a multitude of Italian political exiles. One of the early waves of political refugees from Naples to Malta in 1820 included Gabriele Rossetti, father of the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet Christina Rossetti. He spent two years in Malta before moving on to London. Benedetto’s situation was quite diferent to that of the Italian political exiles. Being Maltese, he was a British subject. He had upset the authorities in Naples but instead of facing imprisonment, or worse, he was able to leave the city and return home to Malta. He gained a reputation for heavy drinking and running up debts. When Adeodata joined the monastery in 1829 and gave up her substantial inheritance as her grandmother’s heir, she helped both her parents financially. In the battle over the unification of Italy, Adeodata remained loyal to Pope Pius IX, or ‘Pio Nono’ as he was known. At the time of his election in 1846, the new pope was viewed by many intellectuals and liberals as a reforming force in the future of a united Italy. Yet in 1848 he published an allocution which initiated the reversal of his positive image among liberal and national activists and their supporters. Anti-clerical sentiments intensified and in November 1848, following riots in Rome, the pope fled to Naples. Adeodata was then novice mistress at St Peter’s Monastery and led the other nuns in fasting and prayer for the Church at this tense time. Tis episode shows that the cloistered nuns kept abreast of political events outside the monastery walls.

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Adeodata’s extended family already had long-standing connections with St Peter’s Monastery in Mdina when she was first introduced to it in the 1820s. Daniele Bonici Mompalao’s aunt, Maria Serafina Bonici, had joined the monastery in around 1785. Maddalena Bonici Apap’s nieces were friends with some of the younger nuns. Te connections continued to thrive and in 1852, when Adeodata was abbess, Paola Bonici Mompalao, daughter of Daniele’s brother Giuseppe, joined the monastery as Sister Maria Fortunata.11 Daniele’s nephew, Pietro Paolo Bonici Mompalao, son of another brother Gio.Battista, was the financial administrator of the monastery at this time.12 St Peter’s Monastery was established in Mdina in the fifeenth century. Over the next five centuries, the monastery was gradually rebuilt and enlarged, incorporating various adjoining buildings. A plan of 1760 held in the Vatican Secret Archives in Rome shows two small, independent houses behind the corner church of St Agatha, still separated from the monastery by a narrow alley (vicolo).13 One of the small houses is noted on the plan as belonging to the cathedral, while the other (marked in yellow) belonged to the monastery, serving as the house of the ‘confessore’. Tese two houses were later modified and annexed to the main building, together with the alley. Te rooms on the mezzanine floor of the former confessor’s house appear to have been the same rooms which later became Adeodata Pisani’s private apartment at the monastery. An internal staircase near her door gave easy access to the dormitories and the upper choir of the church. Towards the end of her life, when her health was failing, Adeodata moved from her single bedroom to the nuns’ dormitory where she died. Her family troubles pursued her to the end. Her father Benedetto had died on 21 June 1837, nine years afer she moved to the monastery in Mdina, and was buried in the Mompalao family tomb at the church of the Franciscan Friars Minor in Rabat, St Mary of Jesus (Ta’ Ġieżu). Benedetto’s disorderly lifestyle must have caused Adeodata considerable anguish. It was rumoured that when he died Adeodata thought of leaving the monastery, but she did not.14 She was still involved in paying of some of his debts in 1854, long afer his death and when she had already been in the monastery for 26 years.15 Another difcult family event, if Adeodata was aware of it, was the publication in 1854 of her grandfather Baron Gaetano Pisani’s court case against his brother, the Jesuit Francesco Pisani. Gaetano had two brothers who both lived in Rome, the Jesuit Francesco and lawyer Carlo Alessandro (1711-70). When Carlo died, Gaetano accused Francesco of stealing his inheritance. Te book was published less than a year before Adeodata died.16 Family feuds and polemics are never easy, especially when they are made public for all to discuss and gloat over. In November 1854, Adeodata paid for an annual messa cantata to be celebrated for the soul of her grandmother Elisabetta Pisani Mamo Mompalao at Ta’ Ġieżu church in Rabat, and another for her father Benedetto every year on 21 June, the

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anniversary of his death. A third was to be held for her mother each November in the same church and, once Vincenza had passed away, on the anniversary of her death.17 Adeodata died three months later, aged 48, on 25 February 1855. Te story of monastic life in Mdina, veiled in the mists of time, has yet to be uncovered and understood. It is hoped that this volume will be followed by further studies, both on the life and achievements of Blessed Maria Adeodata Pisani, as well as on the many other devout sisters who dedicated their lives to work and pray together at St Peter’s Monastery over the centuries.

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Notes

1. Congregatio de Causis Sanctorum, P.N. 1057, Canonizationis 11. According to the Rabat Status Animarum, Giuseppe Bonici Ven. Servae Dei Mariae Adeodatae Pisani (in saec: Mariae Mompalao and his wife and five children (including Teresiae) Moniales Professae Ordinis Sancti Benedicti in Paola) first lived in Strada Ribazza, then moved to Strada Monasterio Sancti Petri (1806-1855): Positio Super Virtutibus del Cemeterio in Rabat, and in the 1850s back to Strada (Rome: 1994). Ribazza (renamed Strada Britannica). In the 1820s, Eugenia 2. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: Te Life of a Bonici Mompalao also lived in Strada Cemeterio together Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, with a younger son, the priest Carlo. Another brother, Gio. 1982). Battista Bonici Mompalao and his wife Antonia Teuma 3. See, for example, Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Castelletti lived in Strada Ribazza with their children, in Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Teir Tellers (London: Chatto the same years when Adeodata was there. Te Castelletti Windus, 1994) family had long-standing ties to St Peter’s Monastery too. 4. See the Status Animarum of the Rabat parish. Gio.Battista and Antonia’s son Pietro Paolo later became 5. Maddalena’s parents were Marchese Filippo Apap the monastery’s administrator, and his daughter Luisa and Anna Maria dei marchesi Mallia Tabone. Daniele (later Strickland) regularly joined him to visit Adeodata in and Maddalena married in 1806 and did not have any Mdina. children. Tey were third cousins, having common great- 12. See Notary Pietro Brincat, R96/22, 14 October 1852, grandparents in Artemisia and Pietro Paolo Azopardi. f. 591v-598v. Adeodata participates in several of the Pietro Paolo was a prominent medic in the eighteenth monastery’s notarial deeds at this period. century, and was appointed to the position of ‘proto- 13. See this and a second plan published in William Zammit, medico’ by Grand Master Antonio Manoel de Vilhena in ‘Malta-Related Visual Material from the Vatican Secret 1735. Archive’, in Arkivju 7 (2016). Te second plan shows 6. Te Mamo Mompalao family lived in Strada Carmine in proposed alterations to the ground floor of the monastery Mdina in the late eighteenth century. Elisabetta married but these were not carried out. Barone Gaetano Pisani, and in 1780 her younger sister 14. See Joseph Flask, Te Blessed Maria Adeodata Pisani OSB Eugenia married Ugolino Antonio Bonici. Ugolino and (Mdina, Malta: Pubblikazzjonijiet Benedittini, 2002), p. 21. Eugenia first lived in Strada Carmine in Mdina, and 15. Notary Pietro Brincat, R96/24, 28 January 1854, f. 48-49. then moved to Strada Cemeterio in Rabat. Gaetano and 16. See Agostino Teiner, Processo a carico del P. Francesco Pisani Elisabetta are registered as living in Mdina in the Status e dei suoi confratelli della Compagnia di Gesù compilato per Animarum of 1790. ordine di S.S. Clemente XIV da servire di continuazione alla 7. Notary Pietro Brincat, R96/12, 4 May 1842, f. 169v. Antonia storia del suo pontificato (Florence: 1854). Cited in ‘Te Pisani Moscati Gatt Xara (d.1656), Baroness of Benwarrad, Imbroglio and the Suppression of the Jesuits in 1773’, in married Pietro Paolo Parisio (d.1841), and was known as Giovanni Bonello, Histories of Malta: Figments and Fragments, Baroness Parisio Moscati. Her second marriage was to vol. 2 (Malta: Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti, 2001), pp. 106-17. Giuseppe Maria de Piro, Baron of Budach. 17. Notary Pietro Brincat, R96/24, 27 November 1854, f. 831- 8. See Godfrey Pirotta, Te Maltese Public Service 1800-1940: Te 834v. Administrative Politics of a Micro-State (Malta: Mireva, 1996), p. 61. 9. Alexander Malcolm, Letters of an Invalid from Italy and Malta 1827 (London: 1897), p. 275. 10. Notary Pietro Brincat, R96/11, 16 October 1841, f. 442v-461v. Daniele Bonici Mompalao died on 23 December 1840. His widow Maddalena Bonici Apap died on 9 March 1857, outliving Adeodata Pisani by two years.

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