Two quite unrelated events that took place last weekend have again focused attention on our relations with our neighbour to the north.

First there was the launch, by the Office of the Prime Minister, no less, of the republication of the first volume on Malta’s archaeological remains by an Italian expert, who came to Malta in the early 1930s. Then there was a seminar organised at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs on the relations between Malta and Sicily.

Malta’s relations with Sicily and ergo, with Italy, are an important part of our history. Until 1814, when Malta was assigned as part of the British Empire, Malta had been part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, even when it was under the Order of St John.

Over the centuries, Malta and Sicily enjoyed a very close relationship – it has been shown that after indigenous Maltese surnames, surnames deriving from Italian and Sicilian ones are the second most voluminous category, with British surnames coming a very distant third.

It has also been proven that the Maltese language owns its Arabic component not through any North African links, but through its links with Sicily. In other words, the Arabic that is the bedrock of the Maltese language is derived from the Sicilian brand of Arabic that was common in the 13th century when Malta was repopulated after the Islamic interlude. After that came the direct influence of Sicilian which gave us many of our technical terms in fields such as carpentry, construction, fishing etc. Then, a third layer, and a later accretion, came Italian, proper Italian this time, which came to Malta with the Order.

All this is now lost, except for whatever survives in our mistreated language. There was, even this is a matter of history, the thorny language question pushed on the one hand by the British colonial powers who wanted to bind the Maltese closer to the British throne and who consequently disparaged anything Maltese as primitive, and, on the other hand, the Italian Fascist thrust to subvert Malta and make it a part of an Italian empire that never came to be. The rest is history: Italian was vanquished even before Italian planes were bombing Malta, and the British language reigned supreme. Even today, it is Malta’s national language, along with Maltese. One good thing that came from these turmoil-filled years was the emergence of Maltese as a real language.

In post-war years, Italian made a brief resurgence when RAI entered all Maltese homes before TVM was born, when Maltese came to glimpse the far better world than the drab Mintoff years could provide, when Maltese followed Canzonissima and San Remo, and Italian football to the preference of anything Maltese.

Even this is now past: Today the Internet speaks English, the films we see in our cinemas are English or American, and most of us have come to use English on a daily basis. Even this newspaper, and others, is in English. As for Italian, many people cannot follow a movie on television and even if most Maltese visit Sicily and Italy regularly, most cannot string a sentence or two without making huge grammatical mistakes (one can argue that many Maltese cannot string a sentence or two in English without incurring mistakes, and that is a relevant, if parallel, point).

Still, it’s a pity, a huge pity, our relations with what we can call our ‘mother’ country have suffered this ineradicable rupture. It’s not just a question of language, but also of culture, and of relations between peoples. Today, many of our local councils are twinned with towns in Italy. However, the recent austerity measures on either side seem to have dampened the exploitation of the potential these links may have for relations between peoples. There was a time when Maltese political parties saw themselves reflected in the Italian ones, but these latter have now changed beyond recognition.

Unfortunately, none of the speakers at the two events mentioned in the beginning, offered any suggestion how to improve matters. One would have thought that with the two now being in the EU and in the eurozone, relations and a real single market would have come into being. There are close commercial ties, by people who import things from Sicily and Italy and not much in the other direction. The former close relationship has gone quite cool.