It was around the turn of a century, 1900 that a student from Gozo was sent to study at the Gregorian University. The fact that he was sent there already shows he was marked for a great future.

His name was Martin Camilleri and his uncle was the parish priest of Nadur.

In time Dun Martin would succeed him and become one of Nadur's most famous children.

Everything, we may say, began in that Rome sojourn.

For there Dun Martin had as a next door neighbour another Maltese, Francesco Saverio Sciortino, brother of the more famous Antonio and cousin of artist Lazzaro Pisani, who had encouraged Francesco Saverio and even helped send him to study art in Rome.

The two Maltese, Dun Martin and Francesco Saverio (who hailed from Zebbug, same as Lazzaro) became great friends and would go round the many monuments in the Eternal City.

As they walked and talked, Dun Martin explained how he wanted to do great things for Nadur in the light of the great art they were seeing around them.

Back in Gozo, Dun Martin unveiled his grand scheme. He wanted to restructure the austere church in the parish on the lines of the great monuments he saw in Rome.

There was one immediate problem: he had no money. But Dun Martin did not let that bother him. He began collecting, and people gave. One man who worked for three months in Marseilles gave all he had earned.

The quarry was chosen: it was in Xewkija, near the Heliport and women helped to clear the site while men helped with their beasts of burden carry the stones up to Nadur.

The old church had been built by Giuseppe Bonnici in 1760, it was an austere Baroque church on a Latin Cross design.

Francesco Saverio Sciortino clothed the old church, so to speak, with the new one. In fact, the old façade is still there, encased in the new one.

During the construction there emerged a remarkable synergy between the priest and the architect. This synergy delivered the remodeled church and the dome which was inaugurated in June 1915, 100 years ago.

To celebrate the 100 years of the completion, an evening of talks was held in the church on Friday, 25 September with the participation of the Nadur parish and the History of Art Department at the university and with talks by Daniel Meilak, Conrad Thake and Mark Sagona.

The collaboration between priest and architect continued even after Francesco Saverio migrated to Canada from where he continued to send designs for the completion of the monumental opus.

Francesco Saverio was born in 1875 and was helped by Lazzaro Pisani to go and study at the Accademia in Rome and later at the Brera in Milan.

He is more known as a sculptor than as an architect. One of his monuments is that of Marquis Scicluna in the Mall, Floriana.

Basically, he added the side naves to the original Latin Cross design of the church. And he added the monumental dome, which stands proudly on top of the hill on which Nadur is built, seen by all who go to Gozo.

The design of the dome is almost an exact copy of the similarly tall dome in Siggiewi, the work of Andrea Vassallo, which was built around the same years. The question is: who copied from whom?

After leaving Malta and migrating to Canada, Francesco Saverio seems to have moved around, to Philadelphia and even to Havana in Cuba.

Then he returned to Malta in 1939 but then World War II broke out and dampened his prospects. Nevertheless, he was to design the elaborate and Art Nouveau frontispiece for the Nadur church which was inaugurated in 1945.

In 1955, 80 years old, he went back to Canada and died there some three years later.

It was quite a natural choice for Francesco Saverio to choose his cousin Lazzaro Pisani both for the paintings and the decoration.

As his past training in Rome and Milan shows, Malta was still dominated by Italy in art, despite being under the British.

From Italy, Pisani brought back not just the Baroque and Renaissance masterpieces in his mind, but also the newer trend in art, called Eclecticism.

At the Academia di San Luca, Pisani came under the influence of Tommaso Minardi and Luigi Fontana who created the silver statue of St Philip for Pisani's Zebbug.

This new style can be seen, for instance, at the Addolorata Cemetery, which was then beginning to fill up and its mix of styles as exemplified by Nicola Zammit.

In those years too, churches began to be enlarged or change their facades, such as the church of St Paul Shipwrecked in Valletta (Nicola Zammit 1885), that of Msida (Andrea Grima).

Those were also the years of the arrival of a new breed of Italian painters who livened up the art scene in Malta (Francesco Grandi at the Mdina Cathedral). Both Francesco Saverio and Antonio Sciortino had been students of Antonio Cardona.

The turn of the century was also the years of the flowering of the decorative art especially in churches. Artists and painters were often called to provide the various objects used in the church's ritual such as silver altar antependium's in which Abram Gatt excelled.

In 1903, for instance, Lazzaro designed two processional candlesticks for the Nadur church that are a real work of art and that would grace any museum.

Those were also the years of the flourishing of Giuseppe Cali, the great rival of Lazzaro. Pisani is considered to be the more academic while Cali is the great romantic artist.

Those were also the years when Virginio Monti was decorating the ceiling of the Birkirkara church and Cali was decorating the ceiling of the Porto Salvo church in Valletta.

Pisani was a master decorator and the Nadur church with its opulent but controlled design reflects this. At the talk, various bozzetti by Pisani, still conserved by the Nadur church, were shown in public for the first time and one could admire the details and the ability of the artist.

Many used to say the stained glass of the dome was also to the design by Lazzaro Pisani but accurate research has revealed that these came from a Grenoble outfit that created many replicas of the windows.

Apart from the Nadur church dome and ceiling, Lazzaro Pisani also did the ceiling of the Dominican church in Vittoriosa but this was destroyed in World War II.

His technique was of drawing on canvas and then gluing it to the ceiling. This turned out to be the right thing to do since other artists such as Cali painted on treated stone but water infiltrations later ruined the paintings. One can only look at the Cali paintings on the ceiling at the Porto Salvo church in Valletta to see the ravages of time and rain infiltrations.

On the other hand, the paintings on the ceiling and in the dome of the Nadur church are still resplendent in their glory as they were 100 years ago when they were still fresh.