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The
Lounge
The first room you come across is
the sitting room, through a Maltese “Antiporta”,
the traditional Maltese second door made out of dark
wood and wine coloured glass. The walls in the room
have been stripped back to the Maltese limestone with
its warm hues.
Settle down with a cup of tea and watch
digital TV (including news channel CNN, 4 local stations,
Italian Rai and Mediaset channels and World Fashion
Channel) or a DVD (DVD Player and library)
to while away the evening after a fine
dinner or a theatre
evening at the Manoel Theatre in Valletta.
The big artwork above the solid wood
bench is an original photographic interpretation of
the famous painting by Eugene Delacroix. Eugene’s
original is at the Musee du Louvre.
The big window still has the original
wrought iron guard.
Thick Walls
(hitan tad-dobblu)
You will certainly notice the thickness
of the walls as you go in through the door. In Maltese
these are called 'hitan tad-dobblu' meaning, doubled
walls, however, these are much more than double. Today
they still use the doubled wall especially when building
the house façade, but this means that they build
an inner wall and an outer one, with nine inches wide
stone slabs (cnagen). However, at the time when these
houses of characters were built, a doubled wall meant
a thickness of about four feet (equivalent to aprox.
one hundred and twenty centimetres). This was so, as
between the outer wall and an inner one, a gap of about
seventy or eighty centimetres was left. The in between
was then filled with a mixture of soil and fragments
of stone (torba or mramma). The thickness of these walls
rendered the house as strong as a fortress and together
with the height of the ceiling of each room these walls
prove to be of some refuge from the winter cold and
the summer heat.
Films related
to Malta
The Malta Story
- This British wartime drama focuses on the crucial
battle for control of Malta. Lieutenant Peter Ross,
a Royal Air Force reconnaissance photographer, gets
shot down over Malta while flying to Egypt. Since he
cannot get off the island, the British forces there
employ his talents to help defeat the Nazis. Ross sets
out to find and photograph the location of the Nazi
forces attacking the island -- but he still finds time
to fall in love with Maria, a local girl.
The film mixes archival combat footage
with documentary-style re-enactments to create a realistic
portrayal of the historic battle. (available in the
Valletta G-House library)
Midnight Express
– Based on a book written by a man who committed
a crime in another land, went to trial, was convicted
and imprisoned, eventually escaped, and wrote a book
about his experiences, a lot of controversy seems to
be generated over the whether or not various events
in the film actually happened. Given Hollywood's penchant
for changing elements in stories so that they may best
come across the screen, even though the film was based
on a true story, take that with a grain of salt and
just watch the film as a film. Turkish authorities undoubtedly
did not want anything to do with this film, so Malta
stepped in. Precisely the jail sequences were filmed
in a part of Valletta that has since been rebuilt. The
area in Valletta is still known as il-Mandragg and was,
back in 1978, the epitome of poverty. |
