Some 300 paintings that adorn the walls of the Main Guard building in Valletta have found a new lease of life, as restoration works on the slice of life artworks have progressed steadily. 

The Main Guard, originally called the Guardia della Piazza, is a guardhouse built by the Knights in 1603, opposite the Grandmaster’s Palace in St George’s Square. 

During the British period, the building was used to house guardsmen, who over the course of 160 years left a collection of drawings ranging from regimental coats of arms to portraits of pretty women and caricatures of people who regularly frequented the area. 

A collection of sketches featuring a regiment badge, a man and a woman in traditional Maltese garb, and a sleeping woman

The odd collection of graffiti is made up of over 300 individual pieces, the earliest dating back to 1814 and the latest made in the early 1970’s, shortly before the building was converted into the Libyan Cultural Centre in 1974. 

Many of the pieces are signed and some include short anecdotes and jokes, inscribed faintly on the walls in graphite, to accompany the humorous artistry. 

Permanent Secretary Mario Cutajar said that the ongoing restoration of the Main Guard building would incorporate a visitor’s centre that would open the murals up to the public and educate the public about Valletta and it’s context in Maltese history. 

“This graffiti is most interesting because they depict scenes of everyday life that soldiers were experiencing as outsiders to Maltese culture,” Cutajar said.

“The soldiers here guarded the seat of power, with the governor residing in the palace just opposite them, and behind them was Strait street and all its colourful characters. So you can see this dichotomous society they are living in reflected in the graffiti.”

“A lot of them are of a very high artistic level, but over and above that, their value is in their meaning, in documenting the ordinary slice of life over a period of well over a hundred years.”

A cartoon featuring a humorous anecdote

Culture Minister Jose Herrera praised Heritage Malta’s work on the project for progressing with care and dexterity and said that in terms of heritage, the project was impressive in terms of its odd diversity. 

“Most of the time we tend to see graffiti as something intrusive, akin to vandalism, but Heritage Malta has recently focused on giving it more importance because some of it is truly unique because it reflects the lives people were living at the time,” Herrera said. 

The British, the minister noted, had a habit of painting over murals, even some dating back to the time of the Knights, once they were no longer in vogue, and it was remarkable that these had been preserved for so long and had not been painted over. 

A guardsman who tripped and fell down the stairs had his gaffe immortalised by a colleague

Senior conservator Twanny Spagnol said that work into the restoration of the murals had been ongoing for seven years, with conservationists researching the painting techniques and history of the murals intensely. 

The work, he said, had yielded priceless information in documenting the murals as well as uncovering even older scribbles and drawings that had been painted over during the course of time. 

“The challenge of conservation is not only preserving the physical but also the historic. The team has worked very hard to preserve and save the older and fainter paintings that survived over time,” Spagnol said.