Mario Scalesi’s Fractured Frontier: a Mediterranean Institute Public Lecture

Event: Mario Scalesi’s Fractured Frontier: a Mediterranean Institute Public Lecture

Date: Friday 20 February 2026

Time: 18:30

Venue: Mediterranean Institute, Tal-Ħursun Farmhouse, University of Malta Msida Campus

The Mediterranean Institute is pleased to announce the next event on The Scalesi Project, ‘La ‘frontiera-frattura’ delle identità plurali - Mario Scalesi, precursore della letteratura multiculturale nello spazio del Mediterraneo’.

This public lecture will be delivered in Italian by Mario Scalesi expert Prof. Flaviano Pisanelli, Co-Director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Suds et les Orients at the University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry, and will take place on Friday 20 February, 18:30 at the Mediterranean Institute, Tal-Ħursun Farmhouse, University of Malta Msida Campus, and is free and open to the public. Students are particularly encouraged to attend.

Prof. Norbert Bugeja, Director of the Institute, will introduce the lecture and deliver English-language synopses at dedicated moments throughout the event.

Launched last December with the contributions of Prof. Alfonso Campisi, University of La Manouba Rector Prof. Ameur Cherif, Prof. Pisanelli and Prof. Bugeja, The Scalesi Project is inspired by the work of the Tunisian-Maltese-Sicilian poet and cultural critic Mario Scalesi, and is jointly run by the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta, the Chaire Sicile within the Faculty of Arts, Letters and Humanities at the University of La Manouba, the Department of Italian Studies and the Unité de Recherche sur les Suds et les Orients at the University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry.

The Scalesi Project is a long-term, public-facing, transmedial and cross-disciplinary initiative that explores Scalesi’s legacy and introduces his oeuvre to a broader international, and Maltese, readership. It also serves as an open platform for collaboration and exchange through multilingual scholarship, with a particular focus on displacement, public memory, and intercultural dialogue across the Central Mediterranean.

The study of Mario Scalesi’s work has prompted critics to explore not only poetic and aesthetic issues related to the author’s body of work, but also a number of social, anthropological, political, economic and cultural aspects of Tunisia – and more generally of the Mediterranean region – in the period between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Starting from the intriguing introduction to Yvonne Fracassetti Brondino’s volume Mario Scalesi, précurseur de la littérature multiculturelle au Maghreb, which also contains the author’s complete works, this paper will trace the biographical experience of a multi-faceted poet, and will attempt to reinterpret Scalesi’s poetic and critical output from an intercultural perspective, in an effort to redefine the portrait of an extremely modern writer and intellectual.

A Q&A Session will follow on from the event, and participants are invited to stay on for networking over light refreshments. Seating is on a first-come-first-served basis.

Flaviano Pisanelli is Professor of Italian Language and Literature at Paul-Valéry University in Montpellier and co-director of ReSO Research Centre. He is a poet and a translator. He has published several critical studies on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s literary and cinematographic works as well as on 20th and 21st century Italian authors’ poetical works (Scalesi, Ungaretti, Montale, Quasimodo, Bufalino, Merini …). Lately, his scientific research has focused on italophone poetry of migration and on the intercultural exchanges of the Mediterranean area (especially Italy / Tunisia). Among his publications: Parole e immagini di una storia “minore”. L’emigrazione siciliana in Tunisia (XIX et XX secolo), Tunis, Arabesques éditions, 2024 (in collaboration with A. Campisi); Natura, sensi, sentimenti. Prospettive critiche sulla poesia italiana del XX e del XXI secolo, Firenze, Franco Cesati, 2023; Confini di-versi. Frontiere, orizzonti e prospettive della poesia italofona contemporanea, Firenze, Firenze University Press, 2019 (in collaboration with L. Toppan); In poesis nomine. Onomastique et toponymie dans « Le Occasioni » d’Eugenio Montale et « Trasumanar e organizzar » de Pier Paolo Pasolini, Grenoble, ELLUG, 2008.