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edited by Mario Buhagiar, Lino Bugeja and Stanley Fiorini
This book focuses attention on the harbour city of Birgu which, nestled in the shade of the haughtily impregnable walls of Fort St Angelo and girt by one of the most splendid lines of the late Renaissance and Baroque fortifications in Europe, has on many occasions been a protagonist in the vicissitudes of these islands. Birgu, like Venice or Genoa, or indeed any other active Mediterranean port, knew moments of scintillating greatness alternating with periods of decadence and social impoverishment.
Its once proud palaces and fine churches disfigured by old age and the insensitivity of time and man rub shoulders with squalid hovels, and its narrow winding streets have been witness both to frivolous pageantry and to the harrowing tragedies of disease and war which, on the two momentous occasions of the Great Siege of 1565 and the Blitz of the Second World War, reduced their buildings to shapeless mounds of rubble.
A full study of this fascinating entrepôt of history would be beyond any one writer. An undertaking of this magnitude requires the specialisation of a variegated team of experts. It is one of the virtues of the book that it has brought together such a pool of expertise. In choosing and securing the papers which make up the two volumes, it has been the wish of the editors to provide the scholar and the general reader with as coherent and complete a picture as possible within the limitations of the present state of knowledge.
Volume I
Contributors: Anthony Bonanno, Godfrey Wettinger, Victor Mallia Milanes, Balbi di Corregio, Dominic Fenech, Lino Bugeja, Stanley Fiorini, Joseph Muscat, Paul Cassar, Joseph Cassar Pullicino
Volume II
Contributors: Leonard Mahoney, Mario Buhagiar, Denis De Lucca, Robert Ghirlando, Albert Ganado, Joseph F. Porsella Flores, Michael Fsadni, George Aquilina, Alexander Bonnici, Peter Serracino Inglott
Book Specifications
- Illustrated, full colour
- 1-388 pp: Volume I
- 389-872 pp: Volume II
- 300 x 215 mm
- Hard bound
- ISBN: 99909-44-00-8 (Two-volume publication)
- ISBN: 99909-44-01-6 (Volume I)
- ISBN: 99909-44-02-4 (Volume II)
Printed by Gutenberg Ltd, Tarxien, Malta
Date of Publication: 1993
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