The origins of lace making in Malta have, so far, not been accurately documented. Through notarial inventories, dowry contacts and painted portraits we know that both knights and ladies adorned themselves with lace since the seicento. Artists Favray and Zahra made fine lace their signature fingerprint in portraits.

Post-war publishers like the ABC Library kept up the uninterrupted tradition of lace makers’ postcards.

The more generally accepted origin of Maltese lace claims a Genoese DNA. I am not that sure. Usually, the vernacular word for an object gives away its origin. A North Italian etymology would have derivatives of merletto or trina while Maltese bizzilla hints to a Sicilian derivation – pizzu, pizzuteddu.

Maltese lace flourished again when Queen Victoria started wearing it after ordering an inordinate number of mitts and a scarf from the island.

Probably the earliest postcard of a lace maker in colour, by Cesare Bornaccini

Giuseppe Valenti modelled the sovereign wearing a Malta lace shawl in her 1891 monument in Pjazza Reġina.

Most postcard publishers included images of lace makers. Rightly so, as Malta lace had established a presence in the islands’ folklore.

I am showing a random selection across time. My grandfather, Giovanni, an early publisher, followed the trend. Thereby hangs a tale.

Colour postcard of lace making published by John Critien.

This charming pre-WWI Gozitan postcard may be the work of the publisher Mikiel Farrugia.

Vincenzo Galea, a prolific postcard publisher, issued this in the early 1900s.

He hired a photographer, a studio with the right props and costumes and a girl to pose as a lace maker. 

A sophisticated lace maker printed in blue, issued in the 1920s by Giuseppe Grech Mifsud.

A 1930s card by graphic designer Alfred Gerada who signed his commercial work Apelles.

The model failed to turn up  and grandpa panicked at the thought of all those fruitless costs. He commandeered my reluctant father, Vincenzo, a beardless lad, into standing in for her.

Lace making in the Maltese countryside in the 1930s

My bemused father told me this story but, for long, I could not acquire an image of the unwilling transvestite.

I finally managed to find the postcard through a foreign internet dealer. It was father! On the back someone had handwritten: Vincenzo Bonello nel 1905!

The author's grandfather issued this postcard in which the sitter is the author’s father.

All photos from the author's collection.

Forming part of a British postcard set ‘Children of the Empire’, Malta is represented by a child holding a lace product.