Mikiel Anton Vassalli has now turned into an icon… no, the icon of Malteseness. Rejected, misunderstood, demeaned, criminalised for many years, only relatively recently has the nation started to acknowledge, slowly and perhaps reluctantly, the unpayable debt of gratitude it owes this enlightened trailblazer. Vassalli was not the very first Maltese man of literature to succumb to the lure of the indigenous language. Others had preceded him, like the Magri brothers, Domenico and Carlo, who, over a century before Vassalli, had already placed on record their enchantment with the arcana of their native tongue. A postage stamp that was issued by Maltapost to commemorate Vassalli. The Magri brothers, though probably the only Maltese bestselling authors throughout Europe in the seicento, have suffered a fate worse than Vassalli. Their originality, their erudition, their pioneering the value of the Maltese language still languish virtually un-acknowledged. Frontispiece of the Maltese grammar published by Vassalli in Rome. Though not the first Maltese to place his native tongue on the pedestal it had been deprived of for centuries, Vassalli certainly remains the man with the sense of...