On Wednesday 30 October 2019 at 6.30 p.m., in the magnificent ballroom of the Casino Maltese in Valletta, the members of the Malta Map Society and the general public assisted to two very illuminating talks delivered by Dr Daniel Gullo who spoke on the ‘Mapping Maltese Slavery in the Early 18th-Century: Records from the Archives of the Confraternity of Charity’; and by Dr Valeria Vanesia who spoke on the ‘The Cabrei of the Langue of Italy: Understanding Archival Description as a Resource for Cartographers and Geographers’.
Dr Gullo currently serves as the Joseph S. Micallef Curator of the Malta Study Center and Coordinator of Digital Humanities Projects at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, in Minnesota, where he curates the collections of Malta, and the western Mediterranean, in addition to being the project director for vHMML, the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library’s online digital resource for manuscript studies.
Dr Valeria Vanesio is the Archivist of the Malta Study Center. Her main field of research is the archival history of the Order of Malta, with a particular focus on the early modern period and on the Italian archival scenario. She is currently working in Malta with Dr Claudia Garradas on several digital projects in various government, ecclesiastical and private archives in Malta.
The event was organized by the Malta Map Society not only to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its foundation, but to also pay tribute to its founder and President, Dr Albert Ganado. At the end of the talks, Dr Ganado thanked everyone for this honour and said that he owes his love for Melitensia and learning to his father Judge Robert Ganado. He said that he would not have achieved anything without the collaboration of so many in the course of his life, and he hopes that he has reciprocated enough by opening his archives and collection to all the bona fide researchers who have approached him over the years.
The Malta Map Society owes a lot of gratitude to Mr Louis Borg Manché who kindly accepted to host the talks at the Casino Maltese.