Malta. Of course Hugo Pratt is not Maltese, since he was born in Rimini, Italy, on 15 June 1927. Corto Maltese, on the other hand, was born in Malta on 10 July 1887, and this mysterious, romantic, libertarian and ironic adventurer, who has taken us with him to the remotest corners of the globe, often in the company of unlikely characters, wears the colors of the island where he was born proudly.