Sybaritic delights
Marcus Binney visits the Baroque Villa Bologna in Malta
Built as a wedding present, this Baroque villa came to be occupied by an English MP and Westmorland landowner. Marcus Binney tells the remarkable story of the building and its gardens
Villa Bologna stands in the village of attard, just three miles from Malta’s fortress capital of Valletta. its large garden is continuously enclosed with high stone walls punctuated with turrets and grand ornamental gateways. as one neighbour commented to me: ‘Malta is so windswept that all garden walls must be 15ft high and 25ft if you want to grow an avocado tree.’
Barely half a mile away is the Palace San anton, a former home of British governors, in a still more extensive garden, as well as the residence of the american ambassador.
The main entrance to Villa Bologna is an archway opening into a cour d’honneur. This is dominated by the two-storey façade of the house. at ground level, the exterior is encrusted with Baroque ornament, including a scroll-topped front doorway and arches with scallop-shell keystones. By contrast, the upper floor is chastely Palladian, with triangular pediments to the windows and no ornamental carving except a coat of arms with a count’s coronet (Fig 5).
The villa was built by Fabrizio grech in 1745 as a gift for his daughter Maria Teresa on her marriage to nicholas Perdicomati Bologna, later the 2nd Count della Catena. Fabrizio grech was both sindaco, or mayor, of the Maltese University and uditore, advisor, to Manuel Pinto da Fonseca, 67th grand Master of the order of St John from 1741 to 1773, and thus both rich and influential.
Nevertheless, the story is told that Grech, being an arriviste, needed to make a grand impression before his daughter could marry into a Maltese noble family. The tale may be an invention and the villa more certainly expresses in architecture the importance of a dynastic alliance that promised great advantages to both families. The marriage took place on April 25, 1745, by which time the house appears to have been ready. It is not known who designed the villa
(Fig 1), but an attribution has been made to master builder Domenico Cachia. The fortress-like Selmun Palace, which has features in common with Villa Bologna, has also been attributed to him. Recent research has, alternatively, suggested the name of Andrea Belli. He was the architect for the imposing and powerfully Baroque Auberge de Castille in Valletta, one of the series of grand lodges built by the knights in the walled city.
The ground floor is an intriguing variant of the perfectly symmetrical villa designs of Palladio, aligned on four porticos. It is planned around a Greek Cross, with four arms of equal length covered by barrel vaults and a central groin vault. The side arms have been glazed in to reduce draughts (Fig 8). Three are aligned on the entrance court and gardens and the fourth is filled with an immense monumental stone staircase rising, in two flights, to the grand rooms on the first floor (Fig 7). These broad flights with closely packed balusters are a recurring feature of grand 18th-century houses on the island.
In the angles of the Greek cross are four rooms, serving as sitting rooms (Fig 2) and a library today. Beyond the staircase, the 1745 villa abuts on older accommodation, including a farmhouse and side wing, which forms one side of the entrance courtyard with a terrace at first-floor level.
The Villa Bologna retains its grand Baroque garden to the left of the entrance courtyard, with squares of grass divided by balustrades and paved pathways aligned on carefully framed vistas. Its first axis is aligned on a statue group, but, on the right, a new view opens up, framed by gatepiers inset with shell-headed niches and statues and topped by muscular gods. Here is an immense Nymphaeum worthy of a cardinal’s garden in a villa outside Rome (Fig 4).
Nymphaeums date back to Ancient Greece, taking the form of grottoes and springs dedicated to river nymphs. Overall, this design, especially the columns, bears comparison to the famous Nymphenbad or Nymph’s bath at the Zwinger Palace at Dresden.
Its central fountain is a play on a triumphal archway, with a central arch flanked by smaller ones, all inset with tufa. The columns are banded to give them a more powerful presence and the Ionic capitals are enriched with garlands. Above, busts set on pedestals enliven the silhouette, with a central mosaic
panel crowned by a stylised scallop shell and richly encrusted with grotwork.
Nicholas Bologna and Maria Teresa Grech had a daughter, Angela, who married Baron Sciberras and the title, with the entail of the villa, passed to their son Nicholas Sciberras Bologna in 1798. Two years later, the Maltese turned to the British to relieve them from the French garrison Napoleon had left behind as he sailed on to Egypt.
Malta became a British Protectorate and, when the 5th Count della Catena died in 1875 without issue, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London awarded the title and lands in 1882 to Gerald Strickland, Angela’s great-grandson.
Gerald, born in 1861, succeeded as the 6th Count. He had been educated at St Mary’s College Oscott near Birmingham and the Jesuit College of Mondragone outside Rome. He then studied law at Trinity College, Cambridge, becoming president of the union.
After a two-year tour around the world, he settled in Malta, helping to revise the constitution and proposing visionary public works—including electricity, drainage and a breakwater across the harbour of Valletta —as well as building 26 schools. Fig 4: The gate piers of the Nymphaeum, with statues of the river gods of the Nile and the Tiber above Antony and Cleopatra. On the fountain are four busts of the seasons with Neptune in the centre
In 1890, he married Lady Edeline, eldest daughter of the 7th Earl De La Warr, by whom he had six daughters. In 1896, he acquired Sizergh Castle, having been elected MP, and thereafter divided his time between his Maltese and Westmorland properties (Fig 3).
Increasing political tensions led him to accept the governorship of the Leeward Islands, then, in sucession, Tasmania, Western Australia and New South Wales, where, as a Catholic, he came up against the Orange faction. Forced to leave, he returned to Malta in 1917, where an exhausted Lady Edeline died the following year.
In Malta, he became Leader of the Opposition and then, in 1927, Prime Minister. The following year, he was created Baron Strickland of Sizergh Castle.
Two years before this British enoblement, he married Margaret, fourth daughter of the newspaper magnate Edward Hulton. She remodelled the gardens of the Villa Bologna, perhaps as an escape from the bitter political battles her husband was fighting. He survived an assassination attempt in 1930 thanks to his trusted butler—at the time, the Maltese bishops had declared that it was a mortal sin to vote for him.
Details of Margaret’s work at the villa are given by Joan Alexander in an absorbing biography of Strickland’s fiery daughter Mabel. ‘Margaret was not only a keen gardener, but also a sybarite. She installed marble floors
(Fig 9), a staircase and bathroom with a Roman bath and, money being no object, with her passion for marble, she ordered marble floors for the subterranean swimming pool.’
Margaret employed the brilliant Guiseppe Teuma Castelletti, known as Contino (‘the little count’) to landscape the garden and bought up the land behind the house to give him greater scope.
Contino created an ingenious fountain with four dolphins clinging to an arched pergola spraying water onto a boy and swan below. From there, a short flight of steps flanked by giant urns leads through to a long pergola formed with stone columns and trellis domes. This has an intriguing resemblance to the pergolas created by the landscape gardener Thomas Mawson at The Hill in Hampstead for Lord Leverhulme.
There is also a sunken pond (Fig 6), with quadrant stone benches, and a miniature tempietto, comprising two concentric rings of square stone piers. Another feature is a large underground cistern supported by columns, which is used as a cool swimming pool in the summer months.
Inspired by the Hanbury garden at La Mortola, Contino created another notable garden at the Villa Frere, now vanished, overlooking the Grand Harbour at Valletta.
With a passion for exotic birds, Margaret built a vast aviary that contained a large pond with swans and surrounded the whole with a high castellated wall dominated at each corner by hexagonal turrets. She also introduced a new carriage drive, allowing limousines to sweep up to a new entrance built on the opposite side of the house, overlooking the new dolphin fountain.
Meanwhile, she and her friends started a pottery in Valletta in St Barbara’s Bastion run by Contino. This was re-established after the Second World War (Contino died in 1942) in the stables at Villa Bologna.
Lord Strickland died in 1940 and was buried in the family vault in the cathedral of the old capital of Mdina. His daughter Mabel, who succeeded to his newspaper interests, played a major role in public life during the siege of Malta in the Second World War. Thanks to her, the Times of Malta never missed an issue during the conflict, despite desperate shortages of newsprint.
Bombs fell in the garden of Villa Bologna, but none on the house. The story is told that a German pilot, bailing out of his plane, landed in the garden and was found by the gardener in a tree, hanging from a parachute. The gardener locked him up, but, perhaps unwisely, he escaped, leaping over the walls into the hands of angry farmers bent on revenge and was never seen again.
The property passed in 1951 to Gerald de Trafford, Lord Strickland’s grandson, a deeply cultured man, who, in another century, might have been a monk. He is the subject of a superb full-length portrait by the American artist Craig Hanna in the black robes of the Knights of Malta.
Charlotte, his wife, invested tireless energy in maintaining the gardens and the pottery and their son, Jasper de Trafford, and his wife, Fleur, returned from London in 2009 to devote their energies to maintaining and restoring the property by opening it regularly to the public and hosting events in the grounds. This has been no easy task, but the Nymphaeum has been handsomely restored with the help of an EU grant, the gardens replanted and the pottery revived in the stables.
Villa Bologna is witness to the aspirations of Maltese Baroque architecture, fired by the direct connections of the Knights of Malta to Rome and other European capitals. It is now open throughout the year, adding to the unrivalled number of superb architectural treasures to be explored in Malta.
The house and gardens are open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, and on Saturday, 9am to 1pm. The standard entry fee is €6. Visit www.villabologna.com
The ground floor is an intriguing variant of the symmetrical villa plans of Palladio