Malta and St Petersburg should deservedly be twinned to commemorate together their bravery and fortitude in facing up to the ferocious Axis onslaught during World War II.

St Petersburg did so by land and air and our island, as many of us experienced and still remember, by the German and Italian air forces, the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica.

Leningrad, as St Petersburg had been renamed by the Soviets, put up a heroic and tenacious defence sacrificing hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants and defenders’ lives to break and rout the 900-day German siege, which had this beautiful city in a stranglehold.

The city’s main thoroughfare, Alexander Nevsky Prospekt, at the time was the scene and venue of daily heart-breaking episodes with thousands of hungry civilians miraculously surviving on scraps of food some of which consisted of recycled material, pushing wearily on the snow-covered avenue hundreds of sledges carrying corpses for burial in or around the city.

The city’s name reverted to its original one of St Petersburg after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

It is interesting to observe that during the contemporary sieges of St Petersburg and Malta, the latter was rearing a person, Alfred Pisani, chairman of the Corinthia Group, who was to carve his name in post-war St Petersburg as a prominent hotelier – contributing materially to the city’s present prosperity by developing, owning and running the magnificent Corinthia Hotel on Nevsky Prospekt.