Palazzo Perellos once again under threat
June 3, 2022 and the decision taken for permit PA 02843/22 will seal the fate of Palazzo Perellos. Situated on St Christopher Street and one of Valletta’s most historic monuments, Palazzo Perellos is one of Valletta’s landmarks within the Grand Harbour vicinity and the Lower Barrakka Gardens. An area where the Valletta skyline can be viewed across the harbour. It is an iconic late 17th-century example of one of Valletta’s palatial buildings and deserves to be Grade 1-scheduled.
The proposed additional floors to the building would dramatically reduce its intrinsic beauty and proportion as well as having a ruinous effect on Valletta’s skyline within the area. Valletta is a UNESCO heritage site and well within the urban conservation area.
If the above permit is approved, a large volume of building at roof top level would have a detrimental impact on Valletta’s skyline and on the perspective of both St Christopher Street and St Ursula Street at street level.
It would most certainly mean that the Palazzo Perellos proportions will be distorted for good.
Madeleine Gera and Henry Deguara Caruana Gatto – Valletta
Bartolo’s conversion
Evarist Bartolo will be immensely more credible in what he writes and says if he denounces unreservedly – and repents as well – the many ‘misdemeanors’ of the Labour government of which he formed an integral part.
But will he?
Carmel Sciberras – Naxxar
Lies and violence
The Washington Post reported on May 23: “Boris Bondarev, a diplomat at Russia’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva, has resigned over the war in Ukraine, writing that he has never been ‘so ashamed’ of his country.”
In his letter of resignation, Bondarev wrote: “I regret to admit that, over all these 20 years, the level of lies and unprofessionalism in the work of the Foreign Ministry has been increasing all the time. In recent years, this has become simply catastrophic.”
“The ministry of today,” he wrote, “is not about diplomacy” but “warmongering, lies and hatred”.
In his Nobel Lecture on Literature (1970), Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed: “Violence is invariably interwoven with The Lie... violence has nothing with which to cover itself except the lie and the lie has nothing to stand on other than violence.”
John Guillaumier – St Julian’s
Let us be changed by the truth
The great French philosopher, political thinker and certainly one of the main proponents of Thomism in the 20th century, Jacque Maritain (1882-1973), wrote: “We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve.”
Am I letting the truth mould me according to itself or am I trying to turn and twist the truth into a lie by making it conform to what I want and desire?
Let us be changed by the truth!
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap – Marsa
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