Pirandello's Malta

Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello was fond of Malta according to Giuseppe Pace Asciak's Il riflesso di Malta in una pagina pirandelliana.Via inutile de déjeuner :

..Che Malta abbia avuto un posto particolare nel cuore di Luigi Pirandello risulta anche dal fatto che il primo biografo dell'autore, Federico Vittore Nardelli, fornisce una personale descrizione dell'Isola, nutrita però di elementi tratti dalla rielaborazione pirandelliana del racconto materno: "L'isola, tu la vedi ancor oggi turrita e glabra, con un dissenso evidentissimo tra l'aspetto esteriore e la creta intima. Chi v'arrivi dal mare scorge uno scenario di muraglie grige, come la chiusa di giardini pensili favolosi; e tra gli alti ripari penetrando nell'insenature cilestri approda al cuore stesso delle terre."

Professor Rino Caputo says that the importance Pirandello attaches to Malta is of an archetypal nature:

In a particularly decisive moment of his life, at the beginning of the First World War, in August of 1915, Pirandello writes Il colloquio con i personaggi in which he imagines that the ghost of his dead mother is trying to alleviate her son’s sorrows by talking to him. But what exactly is she talking about? Not her own death, but rather the typically pirandellian notion that the son feels lost precisely because his mother no longer exists. The son’s sense of loss can obviously be linked to Pirandello’s idea of the six characters in search of an author. The presence of the mother in Taviani’s Kaos can therefore be construed as being practically an exact philological representation of Pirandello’s literary text. Moreover, the film then moves from the vertical or synchronic moment of the phantasmatic apparition of the mother to the diachronic moment, or the flashback, in which Pirandello’s dead mother evokes images of herself as she is forced to go into exile together with the other members of her family. So on a small boat, the little girl embarks on a journey from Sicily to Malta where her family seeks refuge. In the eyes of the child such an experience is transfigured into a journey of mythic proportions.