Santa Venera palazzo to keep its façade and lose everything behind it to 18 new flats
A palazzo named after the 17th-century aqueduct tower across the road would keep its front wall and surrender its interior, its garden and its skyline to a five-storey block, planning permitting.
There is a particular Maltese magic in a building that gets to stay and go at the same time. Palazzo Torretta, on the corner where St Joseph High Street meets Msida Road in Santa Venera, is lined up to perform exactly that trick, planning permission allowing. The proposal keeps the original façade and demolishes everything behind it, then raises five storeys of apartments into the gap. The front returns for an encore. The rest takes a bow it will not get up from.
It is restoration in the spirit of a film set: all frontage and daylight, the architectural equivalent of a saloon in a Western, where you push the doors and find sky behind. The plans promise 18 apartments, a maisonette, a pair of catering outlets, an office and a basement of garages, the whole stack wearing a nineteenth-century mask to the street.
Named for the very thing it will dwarf
The palazzo takes its name from the Torretta, the modest seventeenth-century water tower across the road, a surviving fragment of the Wignacourt Aqueduct that once carried Malta’s water down to Valletta. The tower is a single squat turret. Its namesake would rise to roughly five floors above it. The aqueduct tower is so beloved that the local heritage foundation placed it in their emblem, which means they now find themselves, technically, defending their own logo.
Protection, precisely drawn
Here the planning craft truly shines. The palazzo stands inside an Urban Conservation Area, where heritage enjoys the islands’ warmest protection. Its garden, a mature 250 square metres of green in a town with little to spare, happens to fall just outside that line. So the rules lovingly guard the old stone shell while leaving the trees free to become a footprint. A conservation area, conserved with surgical precision.
Photo: Newsbook Plan your visit
The ground floor already trades under the Torretta name, so the branding, at least, survives the rebuild intact. Visit while the garden is still standing: the loquat and the lemon, the stone well, the green shade of it. Soon the only green left on the corner will be the shutters, kept on a façade with nothing left to shut.
