It was a rather confused woman I met on Trastevere’s Via dei Fienaroli the other day. She was looking for Bibli, a bookshop-cum-cultural space that had become something of an institution in Rome.
A real city needs the experimental contemporary as much as it needs the comfort of memory- Mark-Anthony Falzon
It used to be the place she kept going back to. For her, Rome was Bibli as much as it was the Pantheon or the Coliseum. Only Bibli is no more. Rocketing rents forced it out of business last June.
It all dovetailed with the news that the Malta Environment and the Planning Authority has just scheduled a further 62 shop fronts in Valletta. There’s something about cities and commerce that struck a chord. Mepa deserves a hearty round for this one, for two reasons.
The first has to do with memory. I tend to spend an unhealthy amount of time reminiscing about the Valletta of our childhood with two of my colleagues. Funnily enough, we don’t seem to remember the façades and auberges all that vividly. Rather, the thing we talk about most of the time is shops. Perhaps it has to do with their eye-level immediacy.
Be that as it may, our usual point of departure is Blackley’s on Strada Rjali (neither Kingsway nor Triq ir-Repubblika ever quite worked with locals). We then walk down towards the neighbourhoods where most people actually lived, where every Sunday we bought pasti at Croce Bonaci’s or Briffa’s, or perhaps a cassata at Rubino’s.
Around this time of year we would be towed along to the Economical Shoe Store (‘Azzopardi’ as we called it) on St John’s Street. The place had a double reputation for indestructible footwear and for living up to its name. Perhaps that’s why it hasn’t changed a jot in heaven-knows-how-many years.
Just like the lovely fishing-tackle shop next door in fact – and until recently also Ciarló’s a few doors down which I remember as something of an intriguing cross between the Moulin Rouge and tal-Mużew.
We would also spend hours staring into shop windows. There’s something dreamy about children and shop windows. It’s an age of innocence not yet corrupted by the possibility of actually buying anything, a time when that glazed space seems more like a cabinet of curiosities than products to be had.
There are a good half dozen Swiss knives lying around the house but none has the magic of that giant one (or was it normal sized?) on display at a dispensary on Strada San Marco.
Groceries and confectioneries in particular tend to stick in the mind. Who can forget George on Strada Forni, who sold cooking oil by the bottle from 40-gallon drums and pasta by weight? Quite apart from the obvious Proustian ring, food has the power to evoke memories of kinship and shared meals, and probably also of the daily routines of shopping for our mums.
Like I said, the palaces and Caravaggios and whatnot don’t seem to stir the same kind of passion. Those we discovered later. Not that we were particularly philistine. I think it’s rather because they belong to what some people have called ‘monumental time’, a kind of time which is associated with the grand history of states and peoples and heritage.
‘Important’ (whatever that means) though that may be, they’re a separate species. Real cities also need the more mundane type of time: of lived individual and group memories. That’s where a shoe shop means much more than baroque splendour.
There’s a second reason why I think Mepa has hit the spot. I think we’ve been led astray by the whole ‘city of the Knights’ business. Valletta was that, truth be told. I can also see why it’s fun to play around with grandiose gadgets like watch towers and escutcheons and such. They’re probably the local equivalent of the ‘medieval’ castle and the English popular imagination.
No harm in that, as long as it doesn’t involve boring and anachronistic statues of La Valette in arms (something rotten in the state of Denmark perhaps?) But the lifeblood of Valletta flows elsewhere.
I like to think of it as a multitude of small streams that ran from the harbour through the warehouses and eventually over the many shop counters that made the city a hub of commerce. Historically Valletta is at least as much a city of merchants and shopkeepers as one of knights and renegade painters.
Yet again, shops matter. I have in mind places like the ħwienet tal-Indjani (‘Indian shops’ – readers will be familiar with Gopaldas and Ramchand and others on Republic Street). Not quite a barbican or a Mannerist façade perhaps but living reminders that the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 embedded Malta into a truly global commercial space and brought with it groups of Sindhi Indian merchant-adventurers, among others, to our shores.
Magnificently, some of the goods you find today at Gopaldas are not too different from those the same shop (then called Dhunamall Chellaram Oriental Bazaar) sold 100 years ago. How’s that for continuity?
So then, full marks for Mepa? Yes, on two conditions. First, that we heed the horrors of going all quaint. One of the things that rather bothers me about Mepa is its obsession with wood. Most permits for urban conservation areas come with a warning: ‘All apertures to be constructed using timber’. That’s sensible in some cases, but not all. More modern materials like steel, glass, and even the maligned aluminium have their place too.
Which is why I have mixed feelings about the newly-redone Wembley Stores, for example. It’s a first-class job in ‘traditional’ materials and looks anything but ugly. But it also does away with the old Wembley Stores where we bought the occasional then-exotic thing (perhaps a coconut or some Parma ham or such). It may look good but it’s no longer Wembley Stores, in other words.
The second condition is that Mepa should not over-regulate new shop fronts. A real city needs the experimental contemporary as much as it needs the comfort of memory. That was my, and that of many others, argument for Renzo Piano in the first place. Shop fronts are not shops. I will never again be able to sample Blackley’s cream cakes. But the mind does play funny tricks and I’m sure I’d manage to taste them if all the wood were still on that street corner.
Dedicated to the memory of Umberto ‘Nedved’ Latina.
mafalzon@hotmail.com