~~Mysteries Of the Maltese ‘Gallarija’

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In May 1657, Vincenso de Bono petitioned the Grand Master for permission to add “un balcone di tre saliature” to his house in the lane over the Biccerija in Valletta. Lascaris, about to pass away, gladly issued the permit, considering that “it would not be of prejudice to private or public interests; in fact, it would be an ornament to the city” (1)

Almost nothing is known about the origins of the local gallarija, now so pervasive and unchallenged that it has come to identify with Malteseness. But, if hard fact proves elusive, misinformation about its provenance and antiquity is massive.

In these notes I will try to demonstrate that our closed wooden balcony, is not of Hispano-Moresque origin; that it was introduced relatively recently; and that it is not totally unknown in other countries.

Old, and not so old, authors delight in emphasising the ‘oriental’ ancestry of our gallarija. Fredrick Ryan, in 1910 wrote about “the balconies which are held to be the Spanish miradores, themselves but modifications of the Oriental monacharbis, supported upon solid brackets of stone and closed with gratings”. (2)

In truth, the first balcony-related structure in traditional Maltese rural buildings probably harks back to North Africa: the muxarabija – little abutments still found in a few rural constructions. These stone or wooden “peeping boxes”, however only amount to glorified spy holes, from which a person inside had a restricted view of the street from small eyelets drilled in the side and through the floor. Possibly of Arab origin, they constitute an insignificant and rare instance of a faded memory that kept some of its hold on Maltese vernacular architecture.

Muxarabiji, however, stand miles away from the Maltese gallarija, a theatrical, self-conscious and assertive opera-house box onto the comedy of life enacted in the public space below. The muxarabija hides; it glorifies stealth. The balcony ostentates, makes a statement that being at home at the same time as being out, is yours as of right. The philosophy behind them could not be more diverse and contrasting.

In Malta, open stone balconies seem to be as old as recorded rural townscape. Very difficult to place them in time with any precision, as most of them are undated – one, in Qrendi, shows 1620. Wonderful examples can be found all over Malta and Gozo. I believe it safe to assign the simpler unfussy ones to the pre- or early Order times, those with Mannerist decoration to the middle period and those whose design and carvings cry Baroque, to the eighteenth century.

Open balconies come in various forms and styles. Some rest on stone brackets, elegantly decorated with geometrical patterns or with devices from nature; some on solid stone cushions which grow progressively from the perpendicular wall, generally over the mouldings of a door or window.

Again the upright part of an open balcony corresponds to various archetypes. In some, the dressed stone rises solidly from the floor up to the user’s waist. In others, the masonry fence round the balcony consists of daintily perforated slabs. In others still, a bold balustrade encloses the balcony, or, again, the solid slabs make up half of its height, and small balustrades run over them. By some unexplained circumstances, these open stone balconies appear more frequently and handsomely in Gozo than elsewhere.

The term used for the balcony and its components parts give away its non-Semitic provenance too. As often with Italianised Maltese, they constitute linguistic curios. The balcony itself is called gallarija, an obviously Italian word, but put to a non-Italian usage. Italian has balcone, and reserves galleria to a long, covered, but windowed corridor or passage.

Again, the corbels or stone brackets supporting the structure are called by a word of Italian origin saljaturi (sogliature), a use unknown in Italy – there called mensole or beccatelli. So, also the hinged glass flaps are purtelli (Italian sportelli) and the supple blinds used in balconies tendini (Italian tendine). Why, I wonder, have we adopted Italian words, in some cases giving them a considerably different significance?

The open balcony enclosed in stonework, seems, from early times, to have had a popular alternative – that surrounded by a light wooden fence or a wrought iron railing. These, still common today, in most cases would be coeval with the early ones enclosed in stone.

And this brings me to the major mystery. When did the closed wooden balcony first make its appearance in Malta? What models inspired it? Why?

I feel dismayed at disappointing those lovers of legend who prefer the closed balcony to belong to our history from the earlier mists of time. However not a single instance of a closed balcony appears before the late seventeenth century. Only in the last quarter of that century does it make a debut, and then progresses robustly. I find this assertion quite easy to prove, and am mildly surprised that so few have given due weight to it.(3)

All one has to do is to examine with some attention the dozens of antique paintings of urban townscapes showing Valletta and the harbour cities. In the early ones, up to the years leading to the eighteenth century, not a single covered balcony can be seen. All those depicted are open, with no enclosing wooden superstructure at all. The earliest closed balcony represented on canvas I know of is that round the Old Theatre Street corner of the Palace in Valletta, c. 1675. This could well be the very first boxed balcony in the Maltese islands.

Once the Grand Master (or whoever else) launched the fashion and set the pace, the momentum for closed balconies grew. Over a few years, owners of urban houses enclosed and boxed-in many of their old open balconies. Plenty of evidence survives of this transformation.

The ‘aesthetic’ testimony of these modifications stares one in the face. The large, ungainly wooden boxes fit disagreeably and awkwardly over facades that were not designed to receive them. One can distinguish with a certain ease which open balconies on an elevation were later boxed as an afterthought, from those which were devised and designed as closed balconies from the start as an integral part of an architectural ensemble. Normally, those in the earlier Mannerist or pre-Baroque palaces and houses show themselves to be evident later additions, slammed over an architecture ill-prepared to accept them. In the later Baroque features, on the other hand, covered balconies adhere gracefully to a stonework designed to accommodate them, and emerge effortlessly from it.

Valletta and the harbour towns preserve indelible physical evidence of this boxing in of previously open balconies. These, formerly with lightweight wood or metal railings, were not designed to carry the additional heavy load of the wood and glass superstructure. Problems of stability and safety must soon have manifested themselves in the original fragile stone brackets when these were forced to cope with the unbargained-for weight of the new wood and glass erections.

The solution adopted by the structural engineers of the time to overcome their overweight problems is still very much in evidence today – the masons reduced considerably the existing stone area of the floor of the balcony, by truncating the ends of the old corbels and diminishing the depth of the balcony and thus the leverage exerted. The smaller depth allowed for the new overload without breakage of the projecting stone.

Scores of these “new” wooden balconies, over older truncated corbels, can still be seen in Valletta and elsewhere. One example relates this situation in clear and unequivocal language.

The house in Valletta on the corner between Christopher and Fredrick Street (the back part of the old Palazzo Spinola) at first had two open balconies, each with antique corbels of equal size and pattern. However, when one of the original open balconies came to be covered, the corbels beneath it were hacked off to make them shorter. Till today, the open balcony with the light railing rests on full-sized brackets, while the corresponding, wooden closed one, on stone brackets that have been, very visibly, chopped short. The same truncated corbels can be viewed today under many balconies, originally open, but which, in time, acquired the heavy wooden boxing.

It is difficult to pinpoint a reason why, where no closed balconies once existed, they suddenly started sprouting all over the place. I believe that one reason could be related to a more advanced technology that enabled glass to be manufactured in larger panes. Originally glass came in rather small pieces, suitable for windows, but not for balconies. Add to that the irresistible force of mimicry: if the Grand Master attached a closed balcony to his residence, others were sure to follow.

I have mentioned the Palace balcony over Old Theatre Street as the likely precursor of all closed wooden balconies in Malta. The corbels on the front (Republic Street side) were erected by Grand Master de Redin (1657-60). It seems unlikely that the balcony had been covered by then. A sketch of the palace façade, almost certainly made by William Schellinks in 1664, shows an open balcony with just a protective ledge jutting over it, but no wooden or glass uprights.

The masonry corbelling was later extended to much of the length of the Old Theatre Street elevation by one of the two Cottoner Grand Masters (1660-80) evidenced by the family coat of arms on the supporting brackets and it is probably at this time that the long open balcony was boxed in. Sieur de Bachelier, in his 1679 book, is the first to mention, in his description of the palace, that “a glass-covered balcony joins all the rooms of this side of the building (Old Theatre Street)”.

Bachelier adds a curious observation: “Today’s Grand Master (Nicholas Cottoner) willingly strolls there (through the balcony) without being seen, and discovers from his walk all that is happening in the two piazzas in front and at the side of his palace. If he sees two knights ambling together, he immediately perceives their thoughts and the subject of their conversation, as he knows the minds of all those he governs, and the secret practices of their intrigues.” (4)

Bachelier unwittingly suggests the reason why in Malta a balcony came to be called a gallarija, rather than a balcone. The Grand Master’s balcony was a galleria – a long windowed corridor which linked all the rooms on Old Theatre Street. If the mother of all balconies was – correctly – referred to as a galleria, the others which followed the Grand Master’s would equally be called gallarija, though technically the later ones were not.

How indigenous can we claim the closed balcony to be? Isolated specimens, closely, or less closely, resembling it, can be found in Europe and South America – the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, Palazzo Roverella in Ferrara, S. Agostino in Siena, Palazzo Salviati in the Corso, Rome, the Archbishop’s Palace in Lima and the Abbot’s house in Gyor, Hungary, to mention some. But the fact remains that only in Malta did the closed balcony become the overwhelmingly important feature known to us today.

With the outbreak of Baroque, particularly in Valletta and, to a lesser extent, in Mdina, the Maltese balcony reaches the zenith of its splendour. Now no longer an excrescence stuck to an unwelcoming frontage, architects deliberately plan their elevations around, and subservient to, splendid gallariji, their contours not constrained by the tyranny of the rectangular; sinuous, curved, bombee shapes become fashionable, with elaborate, luxuriant, eccentric stone corbelling to support them.

Not much of the exquisite antique woodwork survives. When the time came for the timber to be replaced, more often than not the “economic” alternative prevailed, and today a plain, right-angled wooden cage replaces the multi-surfaced, curved original, the betrayal given away by the stone floor underneath which still retains its original incurved and winding footprint.

The Maltese gallarija boasted of its own furnishing too: very high-legged chairs or stools (like today’s bar stools) which gave the sitters a vantage view over the street, enabled them to pray and pry at the same time, embroider or knit with a view and play solitaire with one eye on the cards and two ears on the current gossip. Then they all had cane or rush tendini, which could be rolled up to let the sun in, and hung down to thwart the neighbour’s snooping.

The closed Maltese gallarija never died out, and shows little signs of doing so today. The wooden segments at the front and sides underwent some evolution – the earlier were in plain flat planks framed in their supports; then some severe moulding appeared, and finally the rectangular flat diamond pyramid pattern took over. Art Nouveau gave a fresh dimension to the Maltese balcony, and a few examples of Art Deco of the 1920-30s showed that the basic structure could adopt a contemporary idiom.

After the war we suffered the abomination of shining gold or silver aluminium balconies, on projecting concrete slabs not supported by corbels. As long as my father remained on the government Aesthetics Board, he vetoed relentlessly the construction of any Maltese gallariji not resting on corbels.

Parallel to the glittering aluminium disgraces, the post-independence period saw a flowering of Maltese-style gallariji completely encased in carved stone – Baroque taken as far as it would go, and a little further too. Gozo stands out for this riotous ‘lavur, though the new residential estates round our towns and villages also took up the challenge and decided not to lag behind with their vigorous, if sometimes tacky, contributions.

Referemces:

Thanks to Franco Masini for photos of some Gozo balconies, and to Francesca Balzan for illustrations of early Maltese townscapes.

Notes

Thanks to Franco Masini for photos of some Gozo balconies, and to Francesca Balzan for illustrations of early Maltese townscapes.

1. AOM 1185,f.104.

2. Fredrick W. Ryan, Malta, London, 1910, p.143

3. Leonard Mahoney was probably the first to remark that the balcony “is a relatively modern feature, and it totally unconnected with the occupation of Malta by the Arabs. These balconies started to appear in the eighteenth century, but their heyday actually dates from the period of the British occupation”. A History of Maltese Architecture, Malta, 1988, p.101.

4. Sieur de Bachelier, Nouvelle Relation, Paris, 1679. p. 98.

Dr Giovanni Bonello is a judge at the European court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. He is an author and a specialist in Constitutional law

This article first appeared in the Easter 2003 issue of Treasures of Malta, which is published by Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti. Treasures of Malta is a magazine about art and culture which is published three times a year, and is available from all leading bookshops. The first part of the reproduction was published in The Malta Independent last Wednesday.