Vigilo Books

TRAVEL WRITING AND SACRED RABAT

by Petra Caruana Dingli

BOOK Review

John Azzopardi and Thomas Freller, Rabat Sacrum: A Maltese Town in a European Perspective (Rabat: Rabat Local Council, 2022)

Photography and Design by Daniel Cilia 368 pp

Grotto Chapels

In this work, two scholars have brought together a life-time of study in their two distinct but overlapping areas of expertise.

Firstly, the late Monsignor John Azzopardi (1937–2021)—better known as Dun Gwann to his friends and colleagues—who carried out seminal work on the study of the Pauline cult in Malta, especially in Rabat. He began writing about this topic in the 1960s, publishing numerous essays and books on St Paul and the Pauline cult in Malta during the course of his life.

Besides the religious, ecclesiastical, artistic and historical aspects of this cult, he also approached it through the lens of Maltese national identity. He was especially interested in the Andalusian hermit and promoter of St Paul’s shrines in Rabat in the early 1600s, Juan de Venegas.

Secondly, Dr Thomas Freller, who has written extensively on travellers to Malta and their travelogues, from classical times until the nineteenth century, with particular focus on the Grand Tour in the early modern period.

This book thus combines two areas of interest. On the one hand, as suggested by its title, it outlines the religious features of the town of Rabat. Yet it enters the subject, not as a straightforward history, but through the eyes of European travellers who visited the town over the centuries. It describes and analyses how they recorded the architectural and ecclesiastical features of ‘sacred Rabat’—Rabat Sacrum.

The book positions Rabat, as a travel destination, on both a national and an international level, taking a wide perspective. Yet it also delves into a close-up exploration of small corners of Rabat Sacrum, as experienced by foreign visitors over the centuries. Many of them tended to repeat the same details in their travel accounts and diaries, over and over again. However as the accounts accumulate across the pages of the book, a persistent interest in the ‘other’ Malta, that of the Maltese, and beyond the Order of St John, emerges through this chorus of voices.

According to the authors, these numerous descriptions of Rabat by visitors ‘show that there

was an awareness of Malta which went beyond the ‘official’ picture of the island of the Knights of St John’. The interest in the ecclesiastical and monastic character of Rabat mainly centred around St Paul’s Grotto, but it also extended to its Christian catacombs and to its friaries and churches.

While the patron saint of the Order was St John, Rabat’s shrines manifested the devotion to St Paul among the Maltese population, together with other shrines and churches devoted to St Agatha, to the Marian cult of the Blessed Virgin of the Grotto, or to the Madonna tal-Virtu and others, together presenting a nucleus of Maltese identity and character.

The authors note that the Order of St John understood the importance of this, and ‘worked hard to absorb the extraordinary devotion to St Paul into its hemisphere.’ In the early seventeenth century, the enthusiastic Knight of Obedience Juan de Venegas helped to expand and encourage international devotion to the Grotto, and the Order of St John was granted possession of it. Grand Master Aloph de Wignacourt built a collegio for its rector and chaplains (today the Wignacourt Museum). The book also chronicles the interest in the Grotto’s stone, highly prized and widely sold as a powder for the medicinal properties that it was held to possess.

Besides the Grotto, the catacombs in Rabat fascinated foreign visitors. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the Malteseborn Antonio Bosio was at the avant-garde of the study of the catacombs in Rome. This interest in subterranean sites also developed in Malta, understood to be the dwellings and places of devotion of the first Christians on the island. However besides the interest in early Christianity, these sites also offered rich pickings for treasure hunters.

Most visitors did not lodge in Rabat, but in Valletta or Birgu near the harbour. In the early modern period, they were mainly accompanied to Rabat by knights and clerics of the Order of St John, who served as their ciceroni, or guides. Not all kept notes of their experiences, as travel journals ‘were mainly a privilege of the scholars, aristocrats, or men of the church, who were well trained in language and writing and were informed about the cultural aspects of the places they visited from their reading, preparation and contacts’.

This volume presents Rabat as the birthplace of Maltese Christianity. It ends with a brief survey of Rabat today, noting that in 1902, for pastoral reasons, the Rabat parish church ‘shelved its ties with the Cathedral Chapter which went back to 1580, and opted for a separate parish status’. St Paul’s Grotto, which had been handed over the Order of St John in 1626, was given to St Paul’s parish church on 17 April 1961, together with the Church of St Publius above the Grotto and the Wignacourt collegio. The following year, on 24 November 1962 Pope John XXIII elevated the church to a collegiate church. And, quite recently, on 4 April 2020 the collegiate church of St Paul was raised to the dignity of a minor basilica.

The text by Freller and Azzopardi is well presented and embellished by the accomplished photographer Daniel Cilia, who provides a visually attractive and well-researched set of illustrations, which enrich and enhance the pages throughout.

The book is published by the Rabat Local Council and contains a foreword by Rabat mayor Sandro Kraus. He augurs that this publication should be an inspiration for the contemporary visitor to Rabat. He is surely correct on this, however the book’s reach will extend much further, based as it is on the vast research of Azzopardi and Freller, surely the leading experts on both Rabat Sacrum and early modern travel writing in Malta.

As aptly noted by Judge Giovanni Bonello in his preface, ‘when the paths of two heavyweights in the historical research world cross, the results of that cooperation promise to be impressive’. It is a book which any scholar interested in the ecclesiastical history of Malta, the cult of St Paul, and the history of Rabat, should not do without. n

Grand Master Fra Matthew Festing at St Paul's Grotto in 2015