#Royal opera house of valletta archive

Valletta Ferry landing place Marsamxett circa 1930.

Royal opera house by night in the late in the 1930’s.Joe’s collection of photos of Valletta is a lot larger than just 12 photos, but for the sake of brevity, we’ve had to ask him to pick just 12 photos for this article. “I was given the task of reproducing pictures of traditional Maltese views from glass negatives, and that made me yearn to keep doing more.” From then onwards, Joe kept photographing and archiving Malta’s streets and people throughout the years, building a collection that now spans decades. I was chosen to be posted to the forensic photography section so soon after, I did my first photographic course with the Department of Information in Malta and then at the Carabinieri Investigazione Scientifiche in Rome.” Joe explained how, after learning photography and getting to meet some of the best photographers in Malta and in Rome, he was galvanised to delve deeper into the world of photography. “When I enrolled in the Police Force way back in 1966 I spent a considerable part of my first wages on an elaborate photo camera. Starting with Valletta, Joe Scicluna kindly agreed to share with us (and our readers) some of his favourite photos which he has taken of Malta.

#Royal opera house of valletta archive

It’s just a shame that it took the government so long to actually do anything with the ruins of the building.Joe Scicluna, a local archivist with a lifetime of experience in Forensic photography, has, over the span of decades, built an incredible archive of photos showcasing Malta’s towns, streets and places at different periods in time.

It’s positive that the site has been reused and Renzo Piano has done an excellent job, as he has with the city’s new gate and the Parliament building which is located next door. The pillars show how large the original opera house was.Īnd to make it even easier to imagine, here’s what it looked like in 1911. The new building has been controversial as there were numerous suggestions as to how the site could have been redeveloped, but it is now known as the Pjazza Teatru Rjal. The new open air theatre structure has been placed inside the original walls without impacting on them. One of the former entrance doors to the opera house. It had taken just 71 years to resolve the problem……

However, in 2008 a decision was made to renovate the site and by 2013 the new open theatre was unveiled. The government once again roared into action and twenty years later they had again achieved nothing. In the 1980s the architect Renzo Piano contacted the government and made some recommendations about how the site could be used. It was decided that the locals could use the central area of the building as a car park, which didn’t seem a particularly useful way to utilise this prime piece of real estate. Money was approved in 1955 to fund a new building, but it wasn’t spent and there were then decades of delays. The British decided that they’d demolish what was left to avoid any further injury, although since Malta was the most bombed location during the Second World War I’d have thought that the ruins were the least of the concerns that the local population had to deal with.Īnyway, the efficient and effective post-war government roared into action and managed to achieve precisely nothing in terms of rebuilding the opera house. Not set back by this minor disaster work started again on the rebuild and it opened again in 1877.Īll was well with the building until it collapsed on 7 April 1942 after being bombed by the Germans during the Second World War. The new opera house in Valletta pleased and delighted the people of the city until it burnt down in 1873. The city’s royal opera house was built in 1866 and was designed by Edward Middleton Barry, who had also designed London’s Royal Opera House a few years before.