“Life at Sea” at the Malta Maritime Museum

Heritage Malta will open the doors of the Malta Maritime Museum free of charge on Sunday 19th May during the annual “Life at Sea” event as part of the European Maritime Day 2013 celebrations which will be culminating in the international conference on the 21st and 22nd of May.

The European Maritime Day pays tribute to “Maritime Europe”. All maritime sectors and activities are put in the spotlight to help European citizens realise the variety of sea-related activities taking place in Europe. In this context a series of public events will be organised in Malta on Sunday 19th and Monday 20th May 2013. Heritage Malta will be participating by organizing an activity entitled “Life at Sea” at the Malta Maritime Museum. The European Maritime day is being held in collaboration with The European Commission and the Government of Malta. The event is also part of the European Day for Museums.

Visitors will also have the opportunity to walk through part of the Traditional Maltese Boats collection which is currently in storage. Over a short period of years the Malta Maritime Museum has saved for posterity 60 full size traditional boats. Many of these vessels will be on display for the first time to the public. Some of the boats on display date back to 1870. Further to this unique opportunity one can also visit the remaining ovens which used to bake 6000 loaves of bread a day for the Royal Navy in its heyday.

Museum exhibits on display will be brought to life with the help of re-enactors, historians and curators who will be at hand to provide fresh insight into Malta’s unique maritime past and introduce the visitors to various 16th and 18th century characters. This will be an opportunity for visitors to engage in personal discussion with curators, archaeologists and historians.

The re-enactors who will portray the Order of St. John’s 18th century navy will demonstrate hand to hand fighting tactics, artillery manoeuvres as well as explaining the nasty side of seafaring life.

For the first time at the museum 35 armour clad knights will clash against each other demonstrating the rough life at the quay side in Birgu in the 16th century.

When it’s time for a snack or lunch visitors may opt to visit the Malta Maritime Museum tavern, were 18th century recipes will be prepared for the general public to taste history. 18th century Maltese coffee, pies and heart warming chicken stew may be bought at the tavern. All the proceedings from the canteen will go towards the Museums restoration works.

The Life at Sea event at the Malta Maritime Museum is intended to further show Heritage Malta’s endeavour to preserve Malta’s unique maritime heritage and promises to be another amazing day out for all the family.

Programme of Events during “Mattia Preti: Faith and Humanity” exhibition

Heritage Malta has announced the programme of events to complement the exhibition in order to make the Mattia Preti experience a more holistic one.

The first two of a series of gallery talks will be held on Friday 10^th May. “Actors and Audiences in Mattia Preti’s Paintings“ will be presented by curator Bernadine Scicluna at 6:30pm, while senior curator Sandro Debono and conservator David Frank Bugeja will talk about “St Catherine of Alexandria Re-discovered” at 7:30pm.

On 24^th May the subject tackled by Cynthia Degiorgio at 6:30pm will focus on Preti’s “Doubting Thomas” while at 7.30pm Giuseppe Mantella will focus on “The Capodimonte bozzetti, St Francis Xavier and the Sarria paintings for the plague”.

On 31^st May Christian Attard  will talk about “Capodimonte bozzetti, St Sebastian and Calí’s Almsgiving Preti” (6:30pm), while Jessica Borg will give a talk on “Mattia Preti’s Preparatory Drawings for the Vault of St John’s Co-Cathedral” (7:30pm).

The 14^th of June will see three gallery talks: the first by Francesca Balzan (at 6:15pm) will be entitled “The Barberini Banquet”, the second by Bernadine Scicluna (7pm) is entitled “He, Himself and Mattia Preti” while in the third (8pm) former curator Antonio Espinosa Rodriguez will talk on “Cardinal Arias y Porres patron of Mattia Preti”.

Another three talks will be held on 21^st June: Conservators Anthony Spagnol (6:15pm), Charlene Muscat (7pm) and Charlotte Bellizzi (8pm) will all speak about “Conservation and Mattia Preti’s Paintings”.

The 16^th of May marks the first of three tours by curator Sandro Debono who will be giving quite a few interesting insights into the exhibition. The other two dates reserved for these specialised tours are 13^th June and 4^th July.

An educational event which is being considered as one of the highlights of the activities linked with the exhibition is entitled “Paint it like Preti” and consists of two workshops. The first workshop will feature Preti’s manufacturing techniques for an oil painting on canvas. Heritage Malta’s Senior Conservator Ray Spiteri, who has worked on the conservation of Preti paintings, will take participants through the manufacturing techniques behind Preti’s oil paintings on canvas. Participants will work off a preliminary drawing, mix their own colours and paint their own masterpiece just like Preti did. Finally, the participants will be able to take their finished work home with them. This workshop will be held on 17^th May between 10am and 2pm with a second group on 14^th June at the same time. The second workshop which will be held on 31^st May and repeated on 28^th June will deal with the manufacturing techniques used by Preti for his works on stone.

All the events are on first come first served basis due to the limited number of places. The entrance fee for the gallery talks and the tours with the curator is the same as that of the entrance to the exhibition. A different price applies for the workshops. All talks and specialised tours will be delivered in English.

More events will be announced in the coming weeks. Keep yourself updated by visiting the official exhibition site on preti.heritagemalta.org or by following us on Facebook.

 

Free admission to Heritage Malta Citadel museums during Notte Gozitana

Heritage Malta will be opening its Gozo Citadel museums for FREE this weekend during the Lejlet Lapsi – Notte Gozitana.

The four Citadel museums namely the Gozo Museum of Archaeology, the Gozo Nature Museum, the Old Prison and the Folklore Museum, will be open free of charge between 7pm and 12am on Friday 10^th and Saturday 11^th May.

This is a golden opportunity for those who missed visiting the museums during the recent Open Day as part of the 10^th anniversary celebrations from the establishment of Heritage Malta as the national agency for cultural heritage.

The Gozo Museum of Archaeology is housed in a seventeenth century town house known as ‘Casa Bondi’. The museum illustrates chronologically the cultural history of the Island of Gozo from prehistoric times to the early modern period.

Situated behind the Law Courts, the Gozo Nature Museum is hosted in a cluster of houses dating back to the early 17th century.  During the 17th and 18th centuries the building was used as an inn.  The museum extends on two floors and houses collections relating to the Island’s geology, minerals, marine life, insects, local habitats and ecosystems.

The Folklore Museum houses a wide range of exhibits depicting the domestic, rural and traditional ways of life in the agrarian economy of the Maltese Islands in centuries past.  The Museum is located in the apt setting of late medieval houses in Bernardo de Opuo Street. The houses were probably built around the beginning of the 16th century.

The Old Prison was in use from the mid-16th century until the beginning of the 20th century.  The complex is divided into two sections: the entrance hall, which served as a common cell in the 19th century, and a free-standing block with six individual cells.  The walls of the cells and corridors in the Old Prison are covered with graffiti.  The representations include ships, stars, hand profiles, and names, and date from different periods.

This is the latest of initiatives that Heritage Malta has accustomed the Maltese and foreign visitors to in its commitment to make our cultural heritage accessible to all.

 

Face to face with our Ancestors…

When speaking of prehistoric times, most of us imagine our ancestors as aggressive, dirty individuals with unkempt hair, however nothing could be further from the truth. This is what Heritage Malta has proven through its participation in this year’s ‘Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week – Malta’ by means of the exhibition “Jewellery through the times”.

The Megalithic Temples are slowly revealing secrets about a population who was clever, artistic, creative and talented with an eye for detail and a taste for the delicate and the exotic.

The exhibition was followed by a fashion show of replica prehistoric jewellery, which preceded the main highlight: changing the misconception related to the image of prehistoric people by means of a unique reconstruction.

The items featured in the fashion show were replicas of objects worn by individuals who lived on the Maltese islands some 5600 years ago. The artefacts exhibited were discovered at various Prehistoric Temple sites and form part of the permanent display at Heritage Malta’s National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta.

During the event held on Tuesday 7th May, Heritage Malta also launched a 3D virtual reconstruction of facial features based on one of the prehistoric skulls (over 5,000 years old) found at the Xagħra Stone Circle in Gozo. This was a unique opportunity for those present as it revealed, for the very first time, what one of our ancestors actually looked like.

The surprise on the faces of those present was evident as the face revealed was much closer to what one would expect from a woman of our day and age rather than that of a person who lived on the islands over 5,000 years ago… A real case of coming face to face with our Ancestors!