Art

The harbour area around Valletta and the three cities is very picturesque and very inspiring for artists. Hamrun on the other hand is a suburb on a main road and not so interesting to artists. Even so, we do have some lovely paintings of early Hamrun.

It seems that the hill of Atocia would serve a special purpose because of its strategic location not only in war against the French whom the Maltese blockaded inside the capital, but also in more peaceful times.

In the late 18^th and up to the l9^th century before the whole area was built up, painters liked to climb the hill and be inspired by the view looking towards Valletta. We are lucky in this way to have depictions of Hamrun before the photographic process was even invented. One can find numerous artists painting this particular scene and I will include a few with the approximate date painted. In these one can see the Blacas palace in the middle foreground.

Luigi Maria Galea also painted the Hamrun landscape from the Floriana side later on, with the newly built parish church of St Cajetan in the middle background. The Floriana parish church already has its new facade and the Msida Parish church is already built.

I have not come across any Hamrun scenes done in modern times, but as for myself, a self taught artist and being so fond of Hamrun my birthplace, I was inspired to paint a couple. One is of the Church where I was an altar server and where I later got married, That is the small church of Porto Salvo, and the other is of most of Hamrun with the parish church of St Cajetan as seen from the Floriana bastions from where I took the reference photo myself.