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Arnold Cassola, Silvio Aliffi; Malta-Pachino – una storia in comune. Siracusa: Morrone, 2014. 115pp.
Cassola and Aliffi give us here a fascinating account of the founding of the town of Pachino, which is near the south-easternmost tip of Sicily. The town was founded in the 1760s by a mixed group of Sicilians and Maltese, the latter being in a large majority.
Since this part of Sicily was poorly populated, and as the people in the region were not celebrated for their industry and determination to improve themselves, the local nobleman and great landowner intended the new settlement to be populated by Albanians, Greeks and Maltese. In the event, it was Maltese and some Sicilians who responded to the invitation to go there, with the incentive of being given land they could till without paying for it, and some other privileges.
The first wave of Maltese arrived between 1760 and 1762, with a second wave in 1767-68. Cassola’s research makes it clear that many of the settlers from Malta were actually Gozitans. Gozitan scholar Joseph Bezzina later found out that there was a third wave, this time con-sisting solely of Gozitans from Xewkija, who settled in Pachino in the following century, more precisely in 1841. The cult of St Elias, we are told, links Xewkija with Pachino.
The settlers lived in very simple houses, probably similar to the ones many had left behind them in Malta and Gozo, and had to work hard, but they did so and made a good name for themselves. Some of them grew cotton, of good quality too, as opposed to what was happening in their native country, where growing this crop was becoming less profitable.
The Gozitans made the famous ġbejniet and other cheeses, and some of them became animal farmers, with pig-rearing being especially successful. Others made money by toiling in the quarries and doing construction work. Aliffi, the book’s other author, makes it clear that it was the immigrants’ determination to make good that transformed their wretched economic conditions to reasonably good ones.
Some of the settlers formed whole families, but others, of course, were single men who married Sicilian girls. It is difficult to imagine that any of them saved sufficiently large amounts to enable them to go back to their country. Although Cassola does not say this, one imagines that those of them who got too homesick would have managed to save enough to pay for their passage on the xprunari.
A research work relating to what Malta and Pachino have in common
Cassola has taken pains to study the surnames of the Maltese and Gozitan immigrants, many of them still common among us today, while others have become rare or have now practically disappeared. For instance, though ‘Mamo’ is still common, its two variants ‘Momo’ and ‘Mommo’ are not.
Aliffi writes the book’s second section, giving the reader the historical and geographical context of Pachino’s foundation. He writes that today roughly 30 per cent of the inhabitants’ surnames are Maltese. Cammisuli, presumably a variant of Camenzuli, and Mallia are among the town’s commonest names.
In his short conclusion, Aliffi writes that this little book co-authored with Cassola is but the beginning of a research programme relating to what Malta and Pachino, or even the whole of Sicily, have in common.
The book has no index of names, and the reader should know that both Cassola and Aliffi have fairly long bibliographies at the end of their respective sections.