The Malta Independent on Sunday
W|tÜç A businessman turned independent researcher shares his Corona Diary
For some 30 years GIORGIO PERESSO’s world consisted of paper. Then he turned to his love, research, which he shared with presentations at various universities. The organizers of his last lecture in Athens, the Levantine Heritage Foundation, put his lectur
Y “es, the Covid era was and still is very scary. I have a reserved nature and spent most of my life taking care of my family and my business. I was one of the pioneers of the packaging industry in Malta and before I set up shop, I had attended a course about packaging at the University of Nottingham in 1965. It was fun while it lasted. The industrialisation of Malta was fascinating. Two industries that come to mind are Playmobil and Methode. Playmobil owes its origin to the Robens Commission (1967-68). Hans Neuerer, a Swiss sat on the Commission. He attracted a German company, who in turn convinced a fellow industrialist from his home town to come to Malta and Brand International – today’s Playmobil – was born.
Another success story. A Mr Mifsud, a car spare parts dealer in Gzira attracted one of his suppliers Meritwerke to come to Malta – to-day’s Methode. There was a great deal of optimism at that time and the buzz word was diversification.
What has this got to do with Covid? I was looking at the few records remaining from the days when to use my favourite phrase from Arnaldo Foà’s vocabulary I, too, was part of the razza produttiva. To-day, like many others I am labelled vulnerable (read: undesirable). I had to deal with complicated machinery a highly motivated workforce who though not graduates of Massachusetts Institute of Technology made miracles.
So during the Corona (I will never touch that Mexican Corona beer again!) I spent the months like one of my heroes, Giuseppe Donati – l’esilio dentro l’esilio. I had named my house el Alcázar, my fortress. I felt like General Moscardò – Sin novedad en el Alcázar (No news in the Alcázar). There was nothing to note except that sometimes something went wrong with the refrigerator. The usual household hiccups.
Our home really became with the lockdown.
traz
Alca
I am a keen reader. I had hoped that one day I would read from cover to cover Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I didn’t manage it. For all my sins I continued reading about Giulio Andreotti. I must have read 30 books written by or about Andreotti. I am at present reading C’era una volta Andreotti. I have not yet reached the conclusion whether he was a victim or villian but I believe he is a candidate for sainthood.
During the lockdown it was the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of the Italian journalist Walter Tobagi who was killed in Milan in 1980, with five shots fired by a terrorist commando of the left wing Brigade XXVIII March. His daughter, herself an able journalist, Benedetta, wrote a book entitled Come mi batte forte il tuo cuore – storia di mio padre. I met the lady some time ago at the University of Reading, where I delivered a paper about Umberto Calosso. Her book makes interesting reading; she narrates how cruel it was for her, six years old at the time, to have lost her father in that horrible manner. It’s very moving. She recalls the courage of her mother in seeking to speak with her husband’s murderers. Above all
I spend most of the time of this lockdown trying to organise my archives. I went to the University way back in 1962, but I had interrupted my studies, but returned to them in 2007. At the University I was interviewed by Professor Dominic Fenech. I told him about my background underlining that I did not want to have anything to do with the history of Malta from 1951 onwards – vista da vicino.
I obtained a First Class Masters degree with a dissertation The Enigma of Malta Italica – the saga of irredentism while it lasted. I was supported by my tutor Professor Fenech, to whom I am very
grateful. I was keen to move away from political history. For a PhD I hoped to tackle the saga of Prize Courts during the nine months preceding Italy’s entry in the last war. Heaven or hell broke loose! I had no idea that the University, to put it mildly, was so territorial. My idea was ‘rejected.’ I had accumulated a lot of research which I used to present a paper at the University of Edinburgh.
For most of my life I had developed an interest in the history of journalism, focusing mostly on Italian sources. I knew about the connection of two Italians who lived in Malta and researched their Malta connection. In 2015 I published my work entitled Giuseppe Donati and Umberto Calosso, Two Italian anti-fascist refugees in Malta. I was also interested in an Italo-Maltese journalist, Giovanni Giglio who was deported twice from Italy by Mussolini. He shared the microphone at the BBC during the war with Calosso and another Maltese journalist, Paul Cremona, who like Giglio was expelled by Mussolini. Giglio was a topic I chose for a paper I delivered at the University of Bristol. But my ongoing research for the past 10 years – ad kalendas grecas – is the Maltese Diaspora in Greece. I delivered a lecture in the Gennadius Library in Athens under the auspices of the
she bears no grudges and did not criminalize her country for her family’s tragedy.
This brief academic experience left my records in a messy state so I spent a lot of time during lockdown and after, organising various papers, books, ephemera etc.
Life did not change much with Covid except that it added anxiety and deprived me of the company of my little clan. And yes, my archives are in better shape and ready for more research.