The owner of the Grade 1 scheduled Villa Barbaro in Tarxien has made a “desperate” appeal to counter yet another five-floor development application that has reared its ugly head opposite the 500-year-old property.

The pre-Great Siege historic monument is once again being faced by looming flats, threatening its important context, which Marquis Tony Cremona-Barbaro has been fighting to protect for over a decade.

Admitting to being “mentally exhausted”, Cremona-Barbaro described the situation as another “siege”, listing six pending development applications in front of the 17th century villa that risked burying it under apartment blocks.

He was only alerted to the application, PA 02316/21, two days before the recent deadline for objections. But heritage and environment NGOs have scrambled to file their representations against the latest attack.

Reaching out to “those who have our precious built heritage at heart”, Cremona-Barbaro said the proposal to build five floors on the corner of Dejma Street – a mere “shocking” 13 metres from Villa Barbaro on Żejtun Road – would not only have a ruinous impact on the unique heritage monument but also on the traditional two-storey streetscape.

Worse still, the site is opposite its garden wall, which is only half a storey high, he pointed out.

The distance between the historical property (red wall) and proposed development site (green garage).

The Superintendence of Public Heritage has “strongly” objected to the height of the proposed development, citing its negative impact on the setting of the historic villa and demanding it be limited to two floors.

It said it was “extremely out of proportion” to other buildings in the area and “jars considerably” with its surroundings.

In its representation, the SCH referred to the importance of retaining “traditional” styles, proportions and streetscapes, and requested photomontages from various viewpoints.

The concept of buffer zones around UCAs has been a long-standing issue and Cremona-Barbaro’s demotivating battle has stemmed from the conviction that the protection of the context of a historical building was as important as scheduling the heritage home itself.

The villa, already recognised in the 1920s when it was listed among protected monu­ments, was scheduled by the Planning Authority in 1996 for its histori­cal and architectural value.

Although the property, including its gardens, stables, private alley, boundary wall and a buffer zone behind it and to the left were afforded protection in 2009, a case was made to increase it to prevent the potential visual impact of future development on what is considered one of Malta’s oldest country houses.

But the extended buffer zone opposite the villa, trumpeted by the PA last summer, has been of little solace to Cremona-Barbaro and heritage NGOs. It was considered “grossly misleading” because the supposedly protective height limitation of 15.4 metres still allowed for five-storey buildings.

Cremona-Barbaro had said it was in defiance of the authority’s own recent guidelines for the protection of the spatial context of Grade 1 scheduled houses.

But this was not just about Villa Barbaro. “The shameful application is typical of what is happening all over our towns and villages,” he said.

While the public’s attention was concentrated on keeping safe in the pandemic, and PA meetings were held online to the objectors’ disadvantage.

Cremona-Barbaro said “ruthless” developers, on the other hand, who have never been subject to lockdown restrictions, were being allowed to wreak havoc in towns and villages.

“You have here the most bizarre situation where the historic property lies in the UCA, but just across the road is not a conservation area. The distance of the proposed development is, contextually speaking, virtually on the villa’s doorstep and just as devastating as if it were happening in the garden itself!

“Nowhere else in civilised Europe would this situation even be conceivable,” Cremona-Barbaro decried.

Describing it as “nothing short of a destructive rampage”, he insisted it was the result of the authorities’ abject failure to impose a sufficiently protective transition between the UCAs and development zones and, in the case of scheduled buildings, real and effective buffers.