The wealth of physical remains from some 25 kilometres of ramparts in the Grand Harbour alone, are an indelible part of the Maltese topographical fabric. Driving up into Floriana and Valletta, or in the south harbour region of the Cottonera, one is met by a network of redoubts, entrenchments, bastions and counterguards.

Today the Malta International Contemporary Arts Space (MICAS) is part of a €30 million capital project, that is finally returning the intact remains of the San Salvatore counterguard and Ritirata – a prominent section of the historic Floriana Lines – to the public.

This restoration gives life to Malta’s defence architecture in a way unimagined.

After the punishment inflicted during WWII on these Knights-era fortifications, the necessary phase of post-war industrialisation was unkind to these historic structures.

MICAS today stands as the most ambitious of these national restoration projects: the first, standalone heritage and arts project to be constructed in decades, has merged the revitalisation of these centuries-old fortifications into a community project of walkways, gardens, and art galleries.

The story of the Ospizio

The Ospizio – Italian for hospice – was a poorhouse that cared for destitute elderly patients, poor young women, and mentally ill patients during the 18th and 19th centuries.

It was housed in the complex of buildings along the Floriana Lines that are currently being incorporated into the Malta International Contemporary Art Space.

But it started life as a gunpowder mill in 1665, as instructed by the Knights of St John’s congregation of war, to serve the Floriana Lines that overlooked Marsamxett harbour. Designed by military engineer Mederico Blondel, it was completed by 1667, built in the shape of a cruciform building within a rectangular walled enclosure.

It was in 1729 that the former gunpowder mill was repurposed as a hospice by order of Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena – the Knight whose name christened the new suburb, Borgo Vilhena, today commonly known as Floriana.

The ‘Casa di Carità’ was constructed adjacent to the factory, and was administered by elderly knights and clerics. Originally, it featured a courtyard with an arcade and a fountain. The complex included a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary and a sacristy.

It housed some 380 people each year, and was segmented into four areas: a ‘Ginecco’ for elderly women, a ‘Conservatorio de’ Vergini’ for young women, and a ‘Reclusorio’ for female prisoners. Horrifically, mentally ill patients were then chained to walls in the casements that had been added to the gunpowder factory.

The quarters of the old Ospizio, once an old asylum and poorhouse, will be used for artists’ residencies amongst other uses.

Orphanage and asylum

The young women would produce thread from cotton to supplement the Casa di Carità’s revenue. Each year, four of these women were given a dowry of 40 scudi to enable them to marry.

Renamed the Ospizio in 1785 by Grand Master Emmanuel de Rohan-Polduc, it continued to operate during the French occupation over a decade later, housing reformed prostitutes and mentally-ill women, and later as an orphanage for illegitimate children, as well as an asylum for mentally-ill men that had been formerly housed in the Civil Hospital in Valletta.

After 1802, the British in Malta inherited a disjointed medical administration from the Knights and nothing much happened during the French interlude. Attempts were made in 1816 by Governor Thomas Maitland to centralise all the services under his patronage, and it was only in 1837 that a single committee took control of all charitable institutions.

Between 1835 and 1838, the Ospizio’s mentally ill patients were moved to Villa Franconi in Floriana, a large residential building repurposed as an asylum.

Inside the old Ospizio quarters, which were lastly used as a gunpowder store.

Summer of 1837 – cholera outbreak

Cholera reached Malta for the first time ever in the spring of 1837, where it found a poor and destitute population unprepared for the epidemic that was raging in Sicily and Naples.

An ex-voto of the plague from 17 August 1813, of Anna Lungaro, showing the pest hospital in Valletta. By 1837, Maltese doctors were expecting the arrival of cholera in Malta from mainland Europe, very probably with trepidation, since the memory of the 1813 plague outbreak was still fresh in many Maltese minds.

The first cases of cholera in Malta broke out at the Ospizio on 9 June, 1837 – then housing 750 patients. Ten days later, 200 had died.

Cholera peaked in July before finally ending in August. The summer epidemic saw a death toll of 4,252 from 8,785 registered cholera cases – at the time, the Maltese population was 120,000.

Military repurposing

By the end of the 1890s, the elderly at the Ospizio had been transferred to the newly established, and still functioning, national institution for the care of the elderly, the St Vincent de Paul residence in Luqa.

Interior shot of the old Ospizio quarters beneath the La Vittoria Bastion

The Ospizio was transferred to the British Army’s Ordnance Department, and soon enough in WWII, it had gun emplacements installed on the fortifications around the area. The complex suffered significant damage due to aerial bombardment during the war.

After Independence in 1964, the Ospizio complex had several uses: acting as a store for the national utility corporation Enemalta, housing a trade school, and for a brief period as an immigration office.

Layers of MICAS (Part 2): the Floriana lines and San Salvatore bastion