Sicilian Sweets:The Fanciful Frauds of Wily Father Vella

Father Giuseppe Vella was a Maltese clergyman who wrote counterfeit Arabic texts on the history of Sicily at the end of the eighteenth century. This article looks at the texts that Vella produced, analysing them both in terms of their form - written in a sort of limping Maltese Arabic - and in terms of their content, particularly the preposterous claim of being authentic historical sources on the relationship between the rulers of Sicily and the Fatimid territories in North Africa and Egypt. The general story of the counterfeit texts has been known ever since the meticulous detective work done by Bartolomeo Lagumina more than a century ago, and more recently it has also been covered in several publications by Thomas Freller. The grammatical and lexical nature of the counterfeit texts is less well known, however. This is examined in this article. Even though the texts are not genuine, they are nevertheless products of their time and a particular place, namely late eighteenth-century Palermo. The article concludes with a short survey of the modern literary afterlife of the Vella affair.