A new Heritage Malta exhibition traces development of the Auberge and the Langue of Italy.

Old documents, models, and artefacts that usually form part of the national reserve collection are on display at an espresso exhibition which takes visitors through a sensory voyage tracing the development of the Auberge d’Italie as a building, and the Langue which inhabited it between 1576 and 1798.

The exhibition, entitled The Langue of Italy: Building an Identity, is being held at MUZA, the National Community Art Museum, which is housed precisely in what used to be the Auberge d’Italie.

Heritage Malta explained that few MUZA visitors are aware of this historic palace’s unique and rich past.

Before becoming MUZA, the palace served multiple uses, but its original purpose was to serve as the Auberge of the Langue of Italy of the Order of St John.

The development of the palace is intertwined with the history of the Langue, whose archives are now scattered in multiple locations, particularly in Malta and Rome.

These have recently been identified and reconstructed, and the exhibition presents some of them in their original archival space for the first time since the time of the Knights.

Although the Italian Langue has long left the auberge, the building still preserves and communicates stories of the people who lived within those walls.

Their experiences shaped and transformed the place as visitors experience it today, and it is these echoes of the past that the exhibition seeks to recall.This exhibition forms part of a comprehensive project entitled Stories of the Auberge d’Italie: Faces, facets, façades,whose scope is to explore this key historic institution within a contextualised historic urban and institutional landscape.

The project combines the individual research carried out by the four project members, Valentina Burgassi, Emanuel Buttigieg, Christian Mifsud and Valeria Vanesio, to provide a new multidisciplinary perspective with the aim of investigating the building, its uses and functions, the institutional and archival contexts, as well as the social narratives.

The main goal is to outline a multidisciplinary methodology that can serve to explore the other Langues and auberges in an innovative way.

The project is funded by the Internationalisation Partnership Awards Scheme Plus (IPAS+) 2022 of the Malta Council for Science and Technology. Heritage Malta supported the project through all its different stages.

The National Library of Malta is collaborating and lending the original documents of the Langue and the Order of St John for this exhibition.

The Malta Study Center (Hill Museum and Manuscript Library) is also supporting the project by digitising and hosting the exhibited records of the Langue on the online platform vHMML.org.

This will serve to foster research and future collaborative projects. The exhibition also incorporates models created through the I-Access project (UM).

Heritage Malta’s Chairman, Mario Cutajar, and the Rector of the University of Malta, Prof. Alfred J. Vella, were shown around the exhibition soon after its inauguration.

The Langue of Italy: Building an Identity is aimed at all those who wish to learn more about this building as an auberge and its stories.

A booklet about the exhibition may be purchased from MUZA. The exhibition runs until the 24th of September.

Photos: Heritage Malta

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