The Houses of Baroque Valletta, 1650 -1750. Property redevelopment from the records of the Officio delle Case: socio-economic reflection on civil buildings [Book Review]

Abstract

Valletta is nearly always invariably described nowadays as a Baroque city. It is easy to lose sight, nevertheless, whilst walking through its straight streets and piazzas lined with ostentatious palazzi, auberges and churches, that this was not always the case and that the first city, the first Valletta so to speak, had actually come into being after the Great Siege of 1565 as fortress and an expression of the subdued mannerist architecture of the time. Its transformation from a somber fortified city into a city of Baroque splendour only materialized slowly, and in piecemeal fashion, in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.