Baldacchino: Sicily/Lingering Colonial Outlier

                                                - ISLAND REFLECTIONS -

LINGERING COLONIAL OUTLIER YET
MINIATURE CONTINENT: NOTES FROM THE
SICILIAN ARCHIPELAGO

GODFREY BALDACCHINO

University of Malta/ University of Prince Edward Island
<godfrey.baldacchino@um.edu.mt>

Abstract

The fortunes of the wider Mediterranean Sea, the world’s largest, have never rested on
Sicily, its largest island. A stubbornly peripheral region, and possibly the world’s most
bridgeable island, Sicily has been largely neglected within the field of Island Studies.
The physically largest island with the largest population in the region, and housing
Europe’s most active volcano, Sicily has moved from being a hinterland for warring
factions (Sparta/Athens, Carthage/Rome), to a more centrist stage befitting its location,
although still remaining a political outlier in the modern era. Unlike many even smaller
islands with smaller populations, however, Sicily has remained an appendage to a
larger, and largely dysfunctional, state. The Maltese islands are part of ‘the Sicilian
archipelago’, and it was a whim of Charles V of Spain that politically cut off Malta from
this node in the 1520s, but not culturally. This article will review some of the multiple
representations of this island, and its changing fortunes.

Keywords

Archipelago, heterotopias, Island Studies, Sicily, Italy, Malta, Mediterranean, periphery

Introduction

In both its physical and its human setting, the Mediterranean crossroads, the
Mediterranean patchwork, leaves a coherent image in the mind as a system in which
everything mingles and is then recast to form a new, original unity (Braudel, 1985: 5).

On a clear wintry day, one can easily see the snow-capped top of Mount Etna, Europe’s
largest active volcano, from various vantage points on the Maltese islands; and the
lights along the southern Sicilian coast are also readily visible from the northern hills of
Malta during clear nights (see Figure 1). Only 90 km (about 60 miles) separate the two
island groups. But the historical record suggests stronger links than may be inferred
from the diverse sovereign statehoods that the two island groups currently occupy.
Malta was, for many years, part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; and it was a poor
and barren rock with some 12,000 inhabitants under the suzerainty of Charles V of

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                 Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures
                                           Volume 9 Number 2 2015
                                                         - 89 -