This year marks the 240th anniversary of the death of the renowned Maltese architect Andrea Belli.

Belli was born in Valletta on October 15, 1703 and died on October 19, 1772. He is buried at the Carmelite basilica in Valletta.

Andrea Belli was the most prominent Maltese Baroque architect of his time.

He was also a merchant who introduced sawmills in Malta,precisely at Msida, where infact one finds a Sawmill Street.He was Grand Master Pinto’sright-hand man and an exporter of Maltese stone.

Belli was commissioned to build the piano nobile of St Mark’s Augustinian Monastery in Rabat, where the staircase must be counted among his masterpieces and a proto-type of this kind of architecture in Malta.

A year later, in 1741, he was also commissioned to build the staircase at the Auberge de Castille in Valletta.