Pete Buttigieg Is a National Hero ... in #Malta #MayorPete
‘Mayor Pete’ as most people call the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, because his last name is too unpronounceable, is the son of a well known Maltese immigrant Joseph Buttigieg, who taught at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana until his death in January 2019. The professor studied in London and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1979, but he also left a strong legacy in Malta. He was an external PhD examiner who often visited the university to lecture. He also continued until his illness to be an expert lecturer across Europe on Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher whose ideology is still embraced in many left-leaning circles.
The elder Buttigieg, who translated Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, studied at the University of Malta, where he has a lecture hall and a small coffee room dedicated to him. The elder Buttigieg traveled to Moscow to meet Gramsci’s son Delio as part of his research, and quotes him in his research notes.
Five of the eight aunts and uncles of ‘Mayor Pete’ still live on the island of Malta, where locals say the famous nephew has visited many times. There are numerous tourism websites that now show pictures of the Democratic hopeful on sunny beaches and superimposed in restaurants.
The ending ‘tigieg,’ which is Semitic in origin, oddly actually translates to the word ‘poultry’ and is part of countless last names. The first instances of the surname Buttigieg go back to the middle ages, and the Times of Malta reports that it is the most popular last name on the small island of Gozo off the Maltese coast, made famous in the movie By the Sea, in which Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt played a warring couple.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pete-buttigieg-is-a-national-hero-in-malta
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