The Scalesi Project is a long-term, public-facing and interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to the work and legacy of Mario Scalesi, the Tunisian-Maltese-Sicilian poet and cultural critic whose life and writing illuminate the complex histories of identity, migration and cultural encounter in the Central Mediterranean.
Based at the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta, the project brings together scholars from Malta, Tunisia and France to recover and reconsider Scalesi’s work within the multilingual and interconnected cultural worlds from which it emerged. It seeks both to introduce his oeuvre to wider Maltese and international audiences and to use his writing as a point of departure for broader conversations about displacement, public memory and intercultural dialogue across the Mediterranean.
Scalesi’s significance reaches beyond literary history. His writing provides a particularly rich lens through which to examine the plural identities, languages and cultural exchanges that characterised Tunisia and the wider Mediterranean at the turn of the twentieth century.
Research on Scalesi has consequently opened onto questions extending beyond poetry and aesthetics to encompass the social, anthropological, political, economic and cultural histories of Tunisia and the Mediterranean between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work invites us to think about identities formed across rather than within national borders and about the Mediterranean as a space of movement, encounter, fracture and belonging.
The Scalesi Project approaches this legacy through multilingual, transmedial and cross-disciplinary scholarship. Rather than treating Scalesi simply as an individual literary figure, the project places his work within the wider histories and cultural networks connecting Tunisia, Malta, Sicily and the Central Mediterranean.
Its work centres particularly on three interconnected areas:
Displacement and Plural Identities
Exploring migration, mobility and the formation of complex cultural identities across Mediterranean borders.
Literature, Language and Cultural Encounter
Examining Scalesi’s writing within the multilingual literary and intellectual environments of the Mediterranean.
Memory and Recovery
Reconsidering cultural figures and histories that have fallen outside dominant national narratives, and exploring how scholarship, public events and cultural activity can return them to public memory.
Through these strands, the project provides an open platform for collaboration and intellectual exchange between scholars, students and wider publics.
The Scalesi Project is jointly developed by:
• the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta;
• the Chaire Sicile, Faculty of Arts, Letters and Humanities, University of La Manouba;
• the Department of Italian Studies, University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry; and
• the Unité de Recherche sur les Suds et les Orients (ReSO), University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry.
The collaboration builds upon wider intellectual connections between Malta and Tunisia, including the Mediterranean Institute’s continuing relationship with the University of La Manouba and research concerned with Sicilian and Maltese migration, language and identity in Tunisia.
The project was launched in December 2025, with contributions from Prof. Alfonso Campisi, Prof. Ameur Cherif, Rector of the University of La Manouba, Prof. Flaviano Pisanelli and Prof. Norbert Bugeja.
In February 2026, the Mediterranean Institute hosted the project’s public lecture:
La ‘frontiera-frattura’ delle identità plurali: Mario Scalesi, precursore della letteratura multiculturale nello spazio del Mediterraneo
Delivered by Prof. Flaviano Pisanelli, Professor of Italian Language and Literature and Co-Director of ReSO at the University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry, the lecture reconsidered Scalesi as a strikingly modern Mediterranean writer and intellectual, approaching his poetry and criticism through the question of intercultural and plural identities. Prof. Norbert Bugeja introduced the event and provided English-language synopses during the Italian-language lecture.
Further seminars, research collaborations and public-facing activities will continue to develop the project and extend the conversation around Scalesi’s work and the Mediterranean histories to which it speaks.
At its heart, the Scalesi Project is concerned not only with recovering one writer, but with asking what becomes visible when Mediterranean cultural history is approached across languages, shores and inherited national categories.
Through Scalesi, the project opens a larger conversation about migration and belonging, cultural memory and forgotten histories, and the ways in which interconnected Mediterranean lives complicate conventional ideas of where literature, culture and identity belong.