Tag Archives: Giulio Tinaglia

In late 18th-century Palermo, beneath the glare of the Sicilian sun and the shadow of Baroque palaces, power rested on a fragile mixture of absolutism, clerical privilege and historical myth. It was here that Giuseppe Vella, a Maltese abbot attached to the Benedictine abbey in Monreale, carried out one of the most audacious intellectual scams in Sicilian history. Claiming to translate ancient Arabic manuscripts, Vella fabricated texts that rewrote the island’s medieval past in ways that conveniently served Bourbon rule and ecclesiastical interests. The forgery — later known as the Council of Egypt — suggested that many aristocratic privileges had …