Dr Alessandro Di Meo contributed to Panel Two of Day Two of this 2-day workshop speaking on ‘The Connections between Pahang and The Kingdom of Italy in the Writings of Giovanni Battista Cerutti in a Global Perspective’.
Giovanni Battista Cerruti, an Italian explorer, settled in 1882 in Singapore, where he set up a profitable business. He later traveled to Siam, the island of Java, and went to the island of Nias, in front of the Sumatra’s coasts, to facilitate the studies and explorations conducted by ethnographer Elio Modigliani, sent by the Italian Geographical Society. During his explorations in Nias Island, he established a remarkable ethnographic collection, which he sold to the Perak government in June 1891. In the same year, Cerruti settled in the Mai Darat territory, in the interior of the Malay Peninsula, to conduct ethnographic and scientific research, analyze local products, and examine the possibility of exporting them. In the following years, he explored the lands of the Sakai, coming into contact with the Mai Bretak, a people settled on the border between the states of Perak and Pahang (1893); to his experience, which lasted until his death, in 1914, he dedicated a book, Nel paese dei veleni e fra i cacciatori di teste, published in Italian and English as My friends the savages: notes and observations of a Perak settler, Malay Peninsula. In 1906, he briefly returned to Italy, presenting his research on the Sakai in the Milan International Exhibition; in the following months, he sold his ethnographic and naturalistic collections to several Italian museums. Giovanni Battista Cerruti is considered a passeur culturel between late Nineteenth Century Italy and the Malaysian States in the age of imperialism, due to the ethnographic collections he assembled and the reports he published during his lifetime, which will be the subject of this essay.
Please find the slides for this lecture here: https://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/sant/islamic_studies/2026-01-27-sant-cis-alessandro_di_meo-SLIDES.pdf
