Donation to enhance Armoury

The Palace Armoury in Valletta is to benefit from a hefty donation of Lm15,000 from GasanMamo Insurance Ltd over a period of three years.

The Armoury, located on the ground floor of the Grand Master's Palace, has been undergoing refurbishment. The donation should go a long way towards continuing and speeding up the upgrading project, said Heritage Malta chairman Mario Tabone, expressing his gratitude to the insurance company.

The Armoury required special attention, and although new life had already been injected into it, Heritage Malta had "bigger ambitions" for this unique site, whose contents Dr Tabone described as "exceptional even by international standards".

These ambitions could now be realised through the GasanMamo funding, which should be poured into the installation of large information panels, instead of small captions, between the showcases, offering detailed and interesting information about the exhibits.

It would also be used to buy display stands that were fit for such unique items, said Heritage Malta senior maritime and military curator Manuel Magro Conti.

The Armoury has now been organised chronologically and was already equipped with audio guides in six languages, Dr Tabone said. He laid stress on the importance of the "intellectual accessibility" of sites, apart from the physical, which was the general policy of Heritage Malta.

Some of the funding would also go towards educational programmes to increase awareness on the role of the national heritage, he said, highlighting that the Armoury was one of the most visited sites - by foreigners though, and not locals.

Dr Tabone insisted that the national patrimony belonged to everyone and was one of the country's major resources after its people.

He took the opportunity to express Heritage Malta's vision and aspiration to return the Armoury to its original location in the Grand Master's Palace - in what today houses Parliament - and away from the humidity.

Speaking at the signing of the Armoury sponsorship agreement, held yesterday in the museum, GasanMamo's managing director Albert Mamo said the donation was part of the company's corporate social responsibility and also served to underline its recognition of Heritage Malta's work.

There was no doubt that Malta had an immense wealth of heritage, which required the financial support of the private sector, he said.

"It is, after all, what makes us Maltese, and it is also important for the national economy," Mr Mamo continued, insisting on the important role private enterprises had to play in this field.

The Armoury was officially opened as Malta's first public museum in 1860 and ranks among the world's greatest arms collections, comprising a wide variety of armour and weapons, dating back from the 15th century when the Knights still occupied Rhodes and covering some 300 years of armour development until the Order left Malta in the late 18th century.

It contains abundant military material of Italian, German, French and Spanish origin from the principal arms production centres of Europe.

Palace Armoury curator and international arms and armour expert Michael Stroud said "exciting" new discoveries about the collection were currently being made, particularly on the famous names behind the production of these arms.

The collection had never really been studied and explained in such depth, he said. The items had just been hung on the wall.

In the past, viewers were astonished by the sheer and mere magnificence of the amount of items, but now it was a matter of the exciting details that were being discovered about them.