One of Fawlty Towers' most memorable moments must be Basil's final rave in A Touch of Class. Having spent the best part of the episode putting on aristocratic airs, he finds himself snubbed by a 'Sir Richard and Lady Morris'. "You snobs", he screams as they turn down his hospitality, "you stupid, stuck-up, toffee-nosed, half-witted, upper-class, piles of..."

The thing with stereotypes is, they're not terribly amusing when one is at the receiving end. Having spent the best part of these last seven years peddling images of invasions from the primitive south and taunting migrants to 'go back to the jungle', it may well be we now find ourselves misunderstood as some sort of aboriginal Calibans living on rocks on the margins of Europe.

The ongoing tiff between Malta and Italy makes for rich news pickings up north, especially on the heels of the Ferragosto lull. Earlier this week I was interviewed about xenophobia in Malta by an Italian reporter for Il Giornale. She was sharp, as one would expect of a journalist at that level, and had done a measure of homework. What struck me, however, was that she kept asking about our "problems". It seems they make a good story in Italy.

I don't think she was trying to be nasty. Rather, her point of departure was that Malta is not the island paradise most of her readers imagine it to be. Her eventual report, in fact, talked of the 'unspoken Malta' (la Malta non raccontata), that of xenophobia and strange divorce debates. She seemed genuinely intrigued that we are, well, a real place with real social issues.

That much is obvious to us but not so to Italian readers labouring under stereotypes of a holiday island where the sun shines perpetually on a placid people. I had to work hard to convince her that Malta, thanks in part to a topographical feature that historically made it a key maritime node and gave it a large and differentiated population, is not the Mediterranean island of fantasy. For hundreds of years, our harbour made all the difference.

I hear echoes of her misunderstanding in what Franco Frattini is saying about our search and rescue (SAR) area. Is it or isn't it too big for us to handle? In terms of resources it probably is (though migrants in reality move along definite channels, not broad fronts), and I can well understand where he's coming from. At the same time, our foreign minister is probably justified in insisting our SAR area is non-negotiable.

The trouble seems to be that Tonio Borg is thinking nation-states while Frattini has small Mediterranean islands in mind. Frattini is right in saying that our SAR is out of all proportion to our size. Borg, however, is equally right, because with nation-states it's sovereignty, not size or location, that takes precedence. The principle is at least as old as the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.

Could it be that Frattini is politically naïve? I think not. The man draws on a wealth of experience in EU institutions and will be surrounded by all manner of expert advisers. It would be silly to say that he is unaware that we are a sovereign nation-state. Just as my journalist, and her readers, must have suspected Malta is not a wonderland.

There are two possible answers here. The cynical one is that Frattini is playing at junior turf wars, and that Italian journalists will ignore all reason for a good headline. The interesting one is that both international politics and journalism are, each in their own ways, embedded in deep-rooted historical-cultural understandings. Call them stereotypes if you will.

In our case, we're stuck with beaches and, on a good day, 'the Knights'. That's what most Italians think of when they hear the word 'Malta'. But there's more. We happen to be a small island south of Sicily, with all the connotations that carries.

The Sicilian isole signify something rather special for mainland Italians. They are at the same time part of and far removed from the homeland, cocooned by the sea into little pockets of unspoiled 'Mediterraneanism'.

First, they are seen as places where 'time stood still', where Homeric memories survive untouched. Second, they are thought to preserve a slow-paced lifestyle which serves as a counterpoint to the industrial modernity of the north. Third, they are essentially sleepy places, awakened only reluctantly and seasonally by tourist pilgrims from the mainland.

Any book or magazine that describes the isole and their people is bound to be saturated with images of black-clad women, salted capers, unforgiving landscapes, and the rituals of Catholicism-as-it-once-was. It's all there on film too, from Rossellini's Stromboli Terra di Dio (1949), to Michael Radford's Il Postino (1994).

No wonder Frattini seems to find it so hard to take our SAR area, and our political aspirations, seriously. I'm not saying he's watching too much television, but the associations are probably hard to avoid.

It is, of course, not just Italians who enjoy a good island yarn. I was living in England when the case of the Gozitan Siamese twins made world news, and I remember one particular bulletin which spoke of a 'deeply-religious island' and showed shots of the countryside somewhere around Dingli I think, complete with goats streaming across a country lane.

It was an archaic, exotic Malta even Jeremy Boissevain would be hard-pressed to recognise. But the argument goes beyond what's faux and what's genuine. What the world media said about that case - and which, indirectly, affected its outcome - was inextricably linked to images of old-school popery, rugged countryside, and herds of goats in the streets.

In a headline that rubbed many Maltese the wrong way, Il Giornale compared xenophobia in Malta to goings-on in the Parisian banlieues. Never mind the accuracy of the comparison, the idea of northern urban dynamics alive and well in a southern Mediterranean island was probably too shocking for a journalist to resist.

mafalzon@hotmail.com