In pictures: A bird’s-eye view of old urban Malta

Well before balloons, airplanes and camera drones had made bird’s-eye views of cityscapes and landscapes the new normal, inquisitive painters were already striving to create precise images of what no human eye had possibly seen – aerial views of panoramas.

Yes, a city could spread beneath a mountain or be observed from a high tower but artists had worked out the geometric laws of perspective to record with precision panoramas they had never, and could not possibly have seen, from a high up vantage point.

Sliema, Dingli Street area, seen from the air, 1940s.

These exact, map-like bird’s-eye views ‘seen’ at a time when it was physically impossible to do so count as one of the minor marvels of human ingenuity.

With the advent of the balloon and the camera, what before had been the result of imaginative ‘observation’ became routine. Sadly, few early camera artists fell under the spell of Malta’s rooftops. It was only the German photographer Giorgio Sommer, visiting Malta in the early 1860s, who felt inspired by their proto-cubist charms and repeatedly captured that poetry – long before the skyline of the Maltese cityscape ended fatally uglified by water tanks, parabolic antennas, solar panels, air-conditioning compressors, generators and swimming pools.

Roofs of Maltese conurbations, almost universally flat, included a slight gradient to catch rainwater and channel it to the compulsory cistern beneath every tenement.

They were waterproofed by age-old deffun, levelled into place by professional ballata, mostly women. Before the advent of membranes, deffun had provided an invaluable service to housing. It contained powdered unglazed old pottery, for which the ballata relentlessly ravaged the archaeological heritage of the islands. Their primary source of supply came for Punic and Roman burial sites.