With the publication of Professor Henry Frendo’s latest book entitled Europe and Empire: Culture, Politics and Identity in Malta and the Mediterranean, the University of Urbino invited the author to give a public lecture earlier this month based on chapter four of the book, which deals with the influences on former Prime Minister Mizzi during his student days in Rome and Urbino, a pristine Renaissance city, before the First World War. Founded in 1506, this university, now with a student population of 20,000, is one of the oldest in Italy and was initially a centre of excellence in jurisprudence.

Delivered at the Collegio Raffaello, where romantic poet and Maltaphile Giovanni Pascoli once went to school, Frendo’s talk on the young Mizzi was chaired by Professoressa Anna Maria Giomaro, head of the Faculty of Civil Law, and attended by two of the university’s Pro-Rectors. Prof. Frendo discussed Mizzi’s fascination with Urbino and his subjects of study, his thesis and his academic and journalistic contacts and publications, especially in his final year, before graduating from there as a lawyer in 1912. His doctoral thesis dealt with what he considered to be the rights at law of journalists in relation to editors, and of editors in relation to owners − topics that were considered to be quite innovative and seminal at the time, and which remain pertinent today.

It was at this stage, and in such environs, Professor Frendo held, that Mizzi made bold to publicly demonstrate his early irredentist traits. One of the professors at Urbino in Mizzi’s student days, the author Francesco Ercole, later became Minister of Public Instruction under Mussolini, and president of the Regia Deputazione per la storia di Malta in the 1930s, which commissioned Savelli’s book on Maltese history.

Asked what main points he made in his new book, Prof. Frendo noted that apart from a well-documented narrative from different archival sources – including Italian ones – this called into question various historiographical assumptions relating to informal empire, civilising missions, the theory of progress, assimilation, habeas corpus, parliamentary democracy, national identity and the nature and aftermath of colonialism itself. Mizzi’s court-martial, imprisonment and the ransacking of his newspaper office for words spoken in the legislature in 1917 and his subsequent arrest and exile, without charge or trial, are a symptom of what went on in a so-called “fortress”, where signs of disloyalty or dissent to presumed norms were discouraged and risked being severely punished, as happened repeatedly in the 1930s and 1940s.

Entitled Enrico Mizzi: primo ministro Maltese, studente Urbinate, the occasion was featured prominently in sections of the Italian press, including Il Resto del Carlino, which has an audited daily circulation of 2,550,000. Professor of European and Human Rights Law Giuseppe Giliberti accompanied Prof. Frendo to view a newly-framed portrait of Mizzi exhibited in the Rectorate, which was also visited by Commissioner John Dalli during a recent meeting on EU matters at the university. Professor Frendo was appointed an editorial adviser to Studi Urbinati, a prestigious humanities quarterly founded in 1926.