I have often toyed with the belief that Malta is the more disagreeable part of Gozo.

Gozo still retains much of its rural charm, and the damage inflicted to its body, but still more to its soul, when compared to Malta, thankfully looks smaller in consequence and magnitude so far. This, however, stops far short of giving Gozo a clean bill of health.

To cringe, all I have to do is to recollect the deliberate wrecking of the megalithic ‘Brocktorff’ Circle by the owner of the site when the government failed to give in to his demands in a proposed expropriation. Or the demolition of the early seicento Garzes tower overlooking Mgarr so that its stones could be reused in another modern building project, and that of the tower Tal-Qbajjar tal-Qortin near Marsalforn to replace it with a military radio station.

Or the dismantling of the lovely Gourgion fortified mansion, to make way for a temporary airstrip, in any event never or hardly ever used at all.

Or the gaping hole torn in the antique fabric of the bastion of the Citadel willed by priests and politicians in 1956 to destroy the levels and the harmony of the walled city, a compelling and necessary homage to the briju of the vara.

Should I add: or the determination, in the 1950s, to demolish the only important baroque civil building in Gozo, Mondion’s Banca Giuratale, an insane brainstorm to buy votes from more Monti hawkers, only thwarted in its imminent execution by my father, noticeably over the threshold of apoplexy at the news.

Or the obliteration of the mysterious and unique ‘Angevin cemetery’ in Rabat so its place could be taken by the Don Bosco oratory. Or the enthusiastic remodelling of Fort Chambray into a very expensive slum, or the erection of revolting structures on the sheer cliffs of Xlendi, or the destruction of the one-off baroque parish church of Xewkija in the 1960s to make sure a poor copy of an anachronistic Venetian basilica would forever bear witness to cultural folly.

(From Giovanni Bonello’s introduction to his book Nostalgias of Gozo, published by Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti)