The very last lecture in the series organised by Salvatore Musu was held last Monday, earlier than usual because of the coming Presidential changes.

The talk was given by Mr Musu himself, but it was made much more interesting by the wonderful slides of Daniel Cilia. Knowing how these things work, these splendid pictures of The Palace’s art treasures will one day be appreciated in a glossy book, as happened in the past.

A talk about the hidden treasures of The Palace could have some people asking whether there are still treasures that have not yet been discovered, but Mr Musu almost immediately revealed one such hidden treasure.

He showed and proved that the doorway that stands in the background of Caravaggio’s famous Beheading of St John is an exact copy of the doorway of The Palace on Archbishop Street.

Then followed shots of the basement of The Palace, where visitors are not allowed. There are the usual arches similar to any building from the Knights’ time, but the rooms are very low as the British raised the flooring during World War II as an added protection.

We also saw the spaces with upright logs of wood, as we had heard in a previous lecture, put there in British times to absorb the humidity of the place and also the well, which the British turned into a conference room with a bench going round the walls. It was the existence of so many improvised or dug shelters that kept war casualties down to 10,000 while other bombed cities suffered far heavier death tolls.

The next hidden treasure is on the window sill of the central window overlooking Neptune’s Courtyard: this is a graffiti of a ship of the Order.

Facing it on the other side of the corridor is a low opening covered by a grille. This is the famous well of The Palace from where a glass of water was drawn every year and sent to the owner of the land of that part of The Palace, as written in the lease contract.

The Palace’s corridors, both the East one and the West one, have ceilings wonderfully painted by Nicolo Nasoni. The artist had architectural training and, in fact, after leaving Malta, went to Portugal, married a Portuguese woman, had five children and actually practised as an architect. His architectural bent can be seen by the many cupolas, balconies and other spatial elements with which he decorated the corridors of The Palace which would risk a twisted neck to see and appreciate them, but which will become the strong points of an eventual Daniel Cilia book.

Parts of The Palace are still blocked off because parliamentary committees meet in them. Among these, on the Archbishop Street side, there is one, where the House Business Committee usually meets, which used to be the Grand Master’s bedroom. The room is filled with biblical themes, focusing on hospitality, while in an alcove, where the bed used to be, there is a Madonna painted on the ceiling so that this would be what the Grand Master saw when he woke up.

Next door, in the room where the Public Accounts Committee (and also other committees) meets, there are many portraits of 18th century popes and the room is thus called the Popes’ room. On top there is a cycle of frescoes depicting the first 100 years of the Order at the time of the First Crusade.

Further along the corridor, there is the Paladini Chapel which a British governor turned into his bedroom, covering the biblical scenes painted by the artist.

The chapel has lost many of its furnishings, from an organ gallery to its altar.

In World War II, a blast from the bomb that destroyed the Greek church across the road did much damage to the chapel and the Paladini paintings. It has since been wonderfully restored, but this was only thanks to an anonymous civil servant with thousands of lotto tickets available who painstakingly stuck the paint which had flaked and was about to fall.

As said in another lecture, the Paladini altarpiece was later donated by a Governor to the Archbishop and it is still at the Archbishop’s Palace.

On the other side of The Palace, next to Queen’s Square, (called the winter wing) there are the President’s offices. One of them has very recently been restored with what has survived from Giuseppe Duca’s paintings of 25 British Governors. Only 18 have been found in storage and these were restored by the Restoration Centre in Bighi.

Another hidden treasure is the pillow of the Order of St Michael and St George, the chivalric order created by Governor (King Tom) Maitland. This is now in the President’s office.

It is a miracle that the Throne Room survived. The room, where the Order’s Grand Council used to meet, was transformed into an elegant Belle Époque ballroom with blue walls by George Whitman who covered up the precious Matteo Perez d’Aleccio cycle of the Great Siege.

It was ‘King Tom’ who ordered this cover-up job in 1813, maybe to downplay the significance of the Great Siege in the history of Malta. But it was another king, Edward VII, who ordered that the blue material be removed the Perez cycle be restored almost 100 years later, in 1907.

Meanwhile, much damage had been done. In particular, in order to put the gallery taken from the Paladini chapel to the Throne Room, the Perez frescoes suffered the loss of two halves of the paintings on that end of the hall, those showing the attack on the Post of Castile in Vittoriosa and the figure of Grand Master La Valette.

It was ‘King Tom’ himself who changed the name of the hall to that of the Hall of St Michael and St George and who announced this in a special edition of the Government Gazette in 1818.

It was ‘King Tom’ too, who, on becoming Governor of Corfu, took treasures from The Palace with him. Corfu was later ceded to Greece in 1864.

The last hidden treasure of The Palace is the Meridian. As Daniel Cilia showed through computer graphics, there was a hole in the Throne Room’s ceiling (since blocked) and the sun at noon marked the seasons on a line of marble set in the floor diagonally, showing the sun’s rays from 21 December when they would be longest, to 21 June when they would be shortest.

As said at another time, the marble indications of the Meridian have been found and are now in the keeping of Heritage Malta.