The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
How Valletta’s Unesco-listed skyline was saved
The restoration of the spire of St Paul’s Anglican Pro-Cathedral provides yet another reason to explore Malta’s extraordinary capital, says Juliet Rix
Aslim, honey-hued spire and a vast silvery dome dominate the skyline of Malta’s capital, the Unesco-listed city of Valletta. They feature on countless postcards, brochures and guidebook covers. So when fragments of masonry began to drop off the spire, a massive effort was launched to “Save the Valletta Skyline”. It aimed to raise €3 million (£2.6 million) in three years. “Some €8 million and nearly eight years later,” says committee member Christopher Wicker, “the restoration is complete – at least for now.”
More than a skyline has been saved. The spire belongs to St Paul’s Anglican Pro-Cathedral – “pro” because, while a cathedral, it is not the seat of a bishop but is part of the Diocese in Europe serving Anglicans across the continent. This was the site of the first important neoclassical building in the 16th-century city of the Knights of Malta, and the first Anglican church in this devotedly Catholic country. It remains an embodiment of Anglo-Maltese relations from the colonial 19th century onwards, including Malta’s key role in the Second World War.
It all began in 1838 with a convalescent trip to Malta by Dowager Queen Adelaide, recent widow of King William IV and aunt of newly crowned Queen Victoria. Horrified to find the British colony’s Anglican congregation holding services in a cramped room that had been a kitchen in the Knights’ Grand Master’s Palace, Adelaide put up £8,000 to build a church (her final bill was more than twice that – some things don’t change).
Within weeks Malta’s British governor had given orders for a site to be readied by knocking down the Auberge d’Allemagne, the 16th-century home of the German section of the Knights, leaving only its basement to become the undercroft of the cathefind dral. No one seems to have mourned this loss, least of all Adelaide – a German princess – who laid the foundation stone for the new church herself amid much colonial pomp.
Construction, however, did not go smoothly, and the young and inexperienced British designer died (he is thought to have killed himself ) after his partly constructed building began to crack. Thoroughly embarrassed, the colonial power drafted in British Admiralty architect William Scamp, who had helped restore Windsor Castle and was in Malta to build the naval bakery on the other side of the Grand Harbour
How, vocal Maltese protested, could the capital of Catholic Malta be dominated by the spire of an Anglican church?
(now the National Maritime Museum).
In 1844 he completed this robust neoclassical church with a monumental Ionic-columned façade modelled on London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields, but here hidden away on a Valletta side street of limestone steps. Entering via the main entrance in the side wall, we an elegant but simple interior – too plain according to some. Certainly, it was – and is – a far cry from the dazzling baroque cacophony of gold, paint and coloured marble inside the Knights’ main church, St John’s Co-Cathedral, just up the road.
The 200ft bell tower was controversial, too. How, vocal Maltese protested, could the capital of fervently Catholic Malta be dominated by the spire of an Anglican church, especially one muscling in on Malta’s patron saint, St Paul?
The Bible tells of St Paul’s shipwreck on Malta in AD60. The story goes that Paul built a fire for warmth and from the brushwood emerged a snake that bit him. When he suffered no ill-effects, locals saw it as a miracle and venerated Paul, who went on to heal the sick father of the Roman governor, Publius, and convert him to Christianity.
Churches in Malta have always been competitive. When the Catholic Carmelite order in Valletta decided to rebuild its church in the mid-20th century, the architect was specifically instructed to ensure that the dome rose higher than the steeple of its Anglican neighbour – so Scamp’s spire was joined by the dome that now accompanies it on so many images of the Valletta skyline.
Anglican-Catholic relations are better now. The cathedral’s new chancellor, Rev Canon David Wright – just arrived from Wolverhampton (and ex-chaplain of Wolves FC, which will do him no harm in football-mad Malta) – says St Paul’s is, “as close to Catholicism as Anglicanism gets”. And the cathedral regularly hosts events for the modern-day (Catholic) Knights of Malta.
The main altarpiece, indeed, is on semi-permanent loan from a Knight belonging to one of Malta’s leading Catholic families. Marquis Nicholas de Piro, whose home, Casa Rocca Piccola, is one of the last still-occupied traditional palazzi in Valletta, has provided the Anglican cathedral with an Ecce Homo by Alfred Chalon RA, painted the year the cathedral opened.
Flanking this painting, beneath tall Corinthian columns and a handful of colourful royal and military banners, is an array of very English-looking oak panels covered in the names of British military units involved in Malta’s critical role in the Second World War. The Allied Mediterranean fleet was based in Valletta’s Grand Harbour and the invasion of Sicily was planned from the Lascaris War Rooms, a secret HQ deep beneath the city’s streets.
This area was for a time the most bombed place on Earth – and the cathedral was hit, but not destroyed. So important was it that Malta held out against the Axis siege that in 1942 George VI awarded the entire population the George Cross – which still appears on the national flag.
There are memorials in the Anglican cathedral to the Royal Navy, the RAF and the merchant navy – and outside on the restored tower is one to Allied submariners, facing their base at the Knights-period fort across the harbour on Manoel Island (also recently restored). The military connection has endured, as has the royal.
Princess Elizabeth and her new naval officer husband Prince Philip worshipped here when they were based in Malta – a very happy period for the couple living a relatively normal life in a villa in Valletta. Prince Philip became the cathedral’s patron, remaining so until he died, and King Charles, or Prince Charles as he was then, was an early contributor to the restoration fund.
The EU provided €4.2 million (£3.6 million). The rest of the money was raised through donations and events overseen by British ex-pats the late Sir Martin Laing (of the construction company) and his Lady Stephanie, and Martin Scicluna, part of a prominent Maltese banking and brewing family. Valletta without the Pro-Cathedral spire, Scicluna says, is “as inconceivable” as Venice without St Mark’s.
There is certainly no doubt that the Valletta skyline has been saved, with the newly clean spire rising safe once more above the rooftops.
“Mission accomplished,” says Wicker, “Although the roof… and the façade…”