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Sunday
Saturday
Sunday
The *BOAT* the *SEA* the *FORTS*
The beautiful and popular Maltese 'dghajsa'. The calm blue sea and the historical Forts of Malta. You can see many such scenes in Malta's Grand Harbour.
Monday
Maltese countryside ''rubble walls'' ~ ''hajt tas-sejjieh''
These walls look like fortified walls. A true Hajt tas-sejjieh, looks more like these walls that divide the farmland. There is an art to building them as their purpose apart from the obvious, is to let water and wind through but stop soil erosion. The Maltese name for the stone hut that one sees in the farmlands are called ' dwejra '.
Wednesday
The Valletta Lift at Upper Barrakka was closed 1972.
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Macartney, McElroy & Co. Ltd, an engineering company specializing in electric tramway systems constructed the lift, which opened in September 1905.
The lift linked Valletta with Lascaris Wharf and was in use until the sixties when it was shut down. The lift was later dismantled.
The Upper Barrakka Gardens are located on St. Paul�s bastion overlooking the Grand Harbour with a fantastic panoramic view of the harbour and the Three Cities. It was built by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (later to become more commonly known as the Knights of Malta) in 1661 and was used by the knights for exercise and relaxation. In the 1900s the balcony overlooking the harbour was built and the garden was renovated. The order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem have their headquarters across the harbour in Fort St. Angelo.
Today, the Upper Barrakka Gardens are a place where tourists as well as Maltese can go to relax and enjoy the view of the Grand Harbour and the Three Cities. Just below the balcony the "noonday gun" is fired daily at noon to commemorate the Great Siege of Malta.
Lascaris Wharf or "Xatt Lascaris", now commonly referred to as "The Waterfront", has been enlarged and has been upgraded as a dedicated cruise ship terminal. The old warehouses built by the knights have been renovated and turned into restaurants and clubs and the Waterfront has become a very vibrant and popular meeting place for Maltese and tourists alike. Sidewalk patios provide a great view of the Grand Harbour and Fort St. Angelo.
The 100 ton Gun at Rinella Malta
Malta's 100 ton gun is not visible from the ridge road south of Ricasoli and deliberately inconspicuous from the sea but from the little chapel above the film facilities it is silhouetted against the southern skyline.
Its origin arises from the historic struggle between projectile and defensive armour and it represents the culmination of rifled muzzle loading guns of the nineteenth century. One of only two still in existence (the other is at Gibraltar) it was abandoned at the beginning of the twentieth century.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, France was resurgent under another Napoleon and Italy was at last uniting, becoming more than a mere geographical expression, so Britain was obliged to look to its protection of Malta.
Military thought was moving toward fewer guns of a larger size rather than a multiplicity of smaller weapons requiring different sizes of ammunition and Malta's coastal defences were standardised on the 38 ton rifled muzzle loader with a bore of 12.5 inches firing a shell that could penetrate 18 inches of armoured plate at a range of about one thousand yards.
In 1876 the British gunmakers of Sir W. G. Armstrong of Newcastle upon Tyne offered to the Admiralty a gun weighing 102 tons with a bore of 17.76 inches but the British navy rejected it so Armstrongs sold the manufacturing rights to Italy who constructed several of these weapons and fitted four of them in each of their new battleships Duilo and Dandolo that were protected by 22 inches of steel.
The British now realised that these warships could stand off the Grand Harbour of Malta, impervious to the defending weapons and sytematically destroy eveything in and around the harbour.
Almost panic–stricken, the British hastily commissioned guns of even greater calibre of at first 160 and finally 220 tons only to find that this specification was beyond the limits of the then manufacturing technology so swallowing their pride they ordered the 102 ton guns for both Gibraltar and Malta and these were the weapons that still stand at both places. They were actually manufactured at Woolwich Arsenal on the outskirts of London.
There were two guns mounted in Malta in specially designed forts that each cost the sum of 18,890 pounds sterling ; one in Fort Rinella and the other to the north of the harbour at Fort Cambridge that was removed and the fort demolished some years back. The gun at Fort Rinella was declared obsolete in 1905 and the fort used for storage.
The gun required up to forty men to operate it under a battery commander and a master gunner with nine gunners. Twelve men dealt with ammunition, three the position finder and four the range finder. There was also a trumpeter, storeman, lampman and a fatigue man whilst a telephonist maintained contact with its twin at Fort Cambridge and a control station at Fort St Elmo.
Besides the telephone there was back-up semaphore and signal mirror and it was intended that one gun should fire whilst the other was being re-loaded. The rate of fire was once every four minutes but when they tried to increase the rate at Gibraltar they split the barrel. It was never used in anger and was last fired for testing purposes on the 5th May 1905.
Monday
Malta's Aviation Museum on display. March 2008
The Malta Aviation Museum is holding an open weekend which hundreds touring its examples of aviation history at Ta’ Qali today.
Ray Polidano, the museum’s administrator, said some 600 people had toured the museum, admiring exhibits such as the restored Spitfire and Hurricane fighters, older examples such as the 1936 ‘Flying Flea’ and more ‘modern’ jet aircraft such as the Vampire, the Meteor and the Fiat GR91.
The young, in particular, enjoyed trying their hand at the controls of a BAC 1-11 passenger aircraft, whose fuselage lies outside the museum hangar.
Also on display were military vehicles and scale models produced by the Society of Scale Modellers.
About 1,000 people visited the museum on Saturday.
The open weekend continues tomorrow Monday between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
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Photo from Times of Malta News Service
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