Nerik Mizzi was fascinated with Urbino, Italy, where he had studied.
This was evidenced in a public lecture professor Henry Frendo gave at the Italian town’s University last week on the fourth chapter of his recent publication – Europe and Empire: Culture, Politics and Identity In Malta And the Mediterranean.
The chapter deals with the influences on Nerik Mizzi during his student days in Rome and Urbino, a pristine Renaissance city, before World War I.
Delivered at the Collegio Raffaello, where the romantic poet and Maltaphile Giovanni Pascoli once attended school, Prof. Frendo’s talk on the young Mizzi was chaired by Anna Maria Giomaro, head of the Faculty of Civil Law and attended by two of the university’s pro-rectors.
Apart from his fascination with Urbino, Prof. Frendo also spoke about Mizzi’s subjects of study, his thesis, academic and journalistic contacts and publications, especially in his final year, before graduating there as a lawyer in 1912.
His doctoral thesis dealt with the should-be 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, which remain pertinent today.
It was at this stage and in such environs that Mizzi was bold to publicly demonstrate his early irredentist traits.
One of the professors at Urbino in Mizzi’s student days, author Francesco Ercole, later became Minister of Public Instruction, under Benito 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 were the main points made in his new book, Prof. Frendo noted that, apart from a well-documented narrative from different archival sources including Italian ones, his work called into question various historiographical assumptions.
These related 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 later his 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, Prof. Frendo told his audience.