Siġġiewi
Il sudPietra calcarea, campi di cipolle, una chiesa di Lorenzo Gafà fin troppo grandiosa e la caletta di Għar Lapsi.
Per ora questa guida è in inglese. Le informazioni essenziali sono tradotte.
Il luogo oggi
Siġġiewi is a farming town that never bothered pretending to be anything else. The fields around it grow Malta's onions and potatoes, the honey-coloured stone in half the island's buildings was cut from quarries in its limits, and the main square (one of the biggest in Malta) is dead quiet at two in the afternoon and full of folding chairs by festa week. Lorenzo Gafà's church of St Nicholas fills one end of it, absurdly grand for a town of nine thousand. Come the last Sunday of June, the festa is the real thing: band marches, ground fireworks in the square, everyone's cousin home from Australia. The rest of the year, do what locals do: walk or cycle out past Girgenti, where the Prime Minister keeps a summer palace, climb to the Laferla Cross for the view, then drop down the winding road to Għar Lapsi, a rocky cove where Siġġiewi families have swum for generations. Bring water; there's precious little shade.
Come è arrivato fin qui
Siġġiewi is old parish country: it was already one of Malta's ten original parishes on the 1436 list, having absorbed a cluster of medieval hamlets (Ħal Xluq and Ħal Kbir among them) whose chapels still dot the fields. The villagers funded a new church of St Nicholas between 1676 and 1693, the young Lorenzo Gafà's first full Baroque design; it was consecrated in 1729, and Nikol Zammit added the dome, aisles and portico in 1862. The Knights liked this countryside: the Inquisitor's Summer Palace at Girgenti went up in the 1620s and, long after the Order fell in 1798, passed to the state: it now serves as the Prime Minister's summer residence. On 30 December 1797 Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch raised the village to city rank as Città Ferdinand, barely six months before the Order lost Malta to Napoleon. In the early 1900s parishioners planted the Laferla Cross on the ridge above town, still the goal of a Good Friday climb. Underneath everything runs the real economy: globigerina limestone, quarried here for centuries, the stone half of Malta is built from.
