Country Villas in XVIII Century Malta
written by Carmel Spiteri with photography by Charles Paul Azzopardi is available from Kite Group.
The country villas discussed in Carmel Spiteri’s well-researched, beautifully illustrated and elegantly produced book Country Villas in XVIII Century Malta reflect the sophisticated lifestyle and financial well-being of the Maltese elitist class in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The fashion of a country house for the relaxation of the leisured (villa urbana) was common in the Roman Empire, and Pliny the Younger’s seaside villa at Laurentium, affectionately mentioned in one of his letters, is one of the better known examples. Its appeal did not die out with the collapse of the Roman Empire and was reinvigorated by the classicising preoccupations of the Renaissance and Baroque nobility.
In Malta, it was fostered by the Hospitaller Knights of St John, whose refined aristocratic opulence conditioned the local gentry which, in spite of initial social and political hostility (and perhaps as a consequence), did its best not to appear inferior in art, architecture and cultural attainments. A country house with extensive grounds in peaceful settings, with the necessary amenities for a relaxed elegant living, was an important pawn in this process of assimilation.
Although there are earlier examples, the first truly influential example of a lavish house was the one built in the late 16th century by Grand Master Hughes Loubens de Verdalle (1582-1595) in an idyllic setting overlooking the rich hunting ground of Boschetto, to commemorate his elevation to a cardinal in 1587.
Arguably inspired by the fortified villa built c.1530 at Caprarola by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, its planning provided a prestigious prototype for relaxed and leisurely refinement. Its success was quickly emulated by both Knights and Thebes-native nobility, most prominently Antoine de Paule, who built the luxurious Villa Sant’Antonio, in the countryside outside the village of Attard, before his election to the magistracy in 1623.
De Paule also had a second country villa on elevated ground overlooking Marsa around which in 1627, he founded a new settlement (Casal Paula) which, for a time, became a popular venue for other relaxed residences. It was not only the Knights who invested in the building of country villas. The Maltese nobility and gentry were quick to follow. Among the first was Giovanni Francesco Abela (1582-1655) vice- chancellor of the Order, esteemed cognoscente and historian whose villa on Jesuits’ Hill achieved scholarly renown for its collection of antiquities that, in time, formed the nucleus for the National Archaeological Collection.
The fashion of a country house for the relaxation of the leisured (villa urbana) was common in the Roman Empire
Other luxurious country villas were built in the 17th century, but the golden age was the 18th when a friendly rivalry prevailed among the leisured classes for architecturally fine houses catering for an elegantly relaxed living in idyllic settings.
Their extensive, well-groomed gardens were presumably influenced by the Accademia dell’Arcadia with its poetic fascination with pastoral and bucolic life. Sicily provided significant examples while in Malta Grand Master Anton Manoel de Vilhena’s (1722-1736) Casa Leoni in the then open countryside of Strada San Giuseppe (now Santa Venera) provided a state-of-the-art prototype. The finest and most architecturally imposing was Palazzo d’Aurel at Gudja. The palazzo had its origins in a relatively modest country mansion built around 1670 by Count Ignatio Francesco Moscati Navarra, but was extensively remodelled in the 18th century by Pietro Paulo Falzon D’Aurel and more especially by his daughter Marchesa Elisabetta Testaferrata D’Aurel whose creative inspiration and exquisite good taste was primarily responsible for the extensive and extravagant landscaped gardens which are the palazzo’s major artistic asset.
When I first shared ideas with Carmel Spiteri on proposals for his MA thesis in History of Art, Palazzo D’Aurel was top of my agenda. Things worked out differently and following discussions with his supervisor, Professor Conrad Thake, it was agreed, for architectural and logistic reasons, that he focus instead on three other major villas of architectural and landscape interest, namely Villa Gourgion, Villa Preziosi and Villa Bologna, which share a common geographic location but different histories. Spiteri’s painstakingly thorough analysis of them is a major breakthrough in the study of the Maltese country villa and its often overlooked and multi-faceted relevance to the island’s rich cultural heritage. The Department of Art and Art History would welcome similar studies of several other country houses, a number of which such as Palazzo Marnisi, Marsaxlokk, and Villa Barbaro, Tarxien (to mention just two) are of conspicuous art-historical interest. The tragedy is that several houses have either been mutilated or sacrificed to speculative development. Their landscaped gardens run a special risk, as was the case of Villa Gourgion. One need only mention the Attard retreat of Count Saverio Marchesi (1757-1833), a well-informed art cognoscente and a member of the Accademia dell’Arcadia, the gardens of which were ruthlessly destroyed for greedy speculative development.
Although they fall outside the parameters of Spiteri’s research, the history of the Maltese country villa would not be complete without a concluding reference to the 19th and early 20th centuries when the concern for relaxed, refined elegance and opulence opened up to fresh architectural and landscaping concerns which drifted it away from the Baroque preoccupations of the previous centuries. Neo-classicism, Romanticism and Eclecticism combined to produce buildings of notable interest.
John Hookham Frere’s villa at Pietà with its extravagantly spectacular terraced gardens was among the finest in the Mediterranean. This notwithstanding, the appeal of the 18th century remained, in some cases, a conditioning influence as witnessed by the gardens of Villa Grech Mifsud at Mosta which show a clear indebtedness to Palazzo D’Aurel.
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