Improving access to cathedral museum

Now that the Co-Cathedral Museum saga is over, or at least hopefully so, a few appropriate considerations occur to my mind.

While thanking the Co-Cathedral Foundation for the sterling work they have been doing during the past few years, one cannot but admire their courageous and humble response, better late than never, in finally shelving their weird and extravagant project of digging up under St John's Square to provide more room for exhibiting the priceless Flemish tapestries and other precious artifacts.

The next step, which I suggest and hope will be taken in due consideration, is the present status of the Co-Cathedral itself. As it looks, the Co-Cathedral has now almost become part of the museum itself. It has practically become closed to the public for most of the day and made accessible to tourists against a fee. Why not return to the previous arrangement whereby entrance to the museum was placed in one of the side corridors adjoining the church just near the side access to the Caravaggio Chapel?

As things are at present, the majority of Maltese citizens, who are at work during the day, are practically precluded from enjoying the sight of the precious tapestries which in years gone by used to hang, at least during certain periods of the year, along the main nave of the Co-Cathedral where they were initially made for. If you just mention these tapestries to an average or middle-aged Maltese citizen, he will probably tell you that he does not know what you are talking about.

The gentlemen now serving as members of the Co-Cathedral Foundation keep mentioning the fact that a large number of precious sacred objects are now being stored up for lack of space in the existing limited space provided by the present museum. But who says that all precious items belonging to a museum must be all exhibited to the public at the same time? While visiting the Louvre in Paris a few years ago, one of the guards told me that what is being exhibited is only a small number of the statues and paintings belonging to the museum. To exhibit them all at once another Louvre would need to be built!

In my childhood years before the war in Valletta, the two large corridors along both sides of the Co-Cathedral used to be kept open to give alternative access to the church from St Lucy Street. Are not these corridors spacious enough to be used as a possible extension to the present museum?