The European Commission has approved a grant of €145,900 (Lm63,500) for a cultural project on cart ruts led by Malta's Museum of Archaeology.
The project, entitled The Significance of Cart Ruts in Ancient Landscapes, aims to bring cultural heritage into the public domain and address the role of culture in the socio-economic development of a country.
The project involves the documentation and correlation of cart ruts in the Maltese Islands and Spain and includes the development of documentation techniques, the evaluation of sites, seminars on the resulting information, a publication and a travelling exhibition.
A spokesman for the European Commission told The Times the project will be carried out by the end of September of next year and apart from the museum the project involves other Maltese, Italian and Spanish partners. Heritage Malta, the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, the Ministry of Resources of Infrastructure and the University of Malta are the other Maltese partners, joining the University of Urbino in Italy and Aproteco, a Spanish cultural organisation.
The spokesman said the project aims also to promote good practices in sustainable conservation, integrated heritage management and networking between stakeholders at a local and pan-European level.
Malta is also involved in other cultural projects with EU grants under the Culture 2000 programme. The University of Malta is a co-organiser of a project led by the Perugia local council in Italy which consists of a study of the artistic value of the Order of the Knight Templars. This project was granted €149,000 and is being conducted together with French, Spanish and Italian organisations.
Heritage Malta is participating in a project called Outstep involving its Italian, German and Greek counterparts. The project involves the cultural enhancement of historic buildings through the interaction between historic research and contemporary artworks. The EU has granted €66,000 towards this project.
The University of Malta is also the co-organiser of another cultural project called Lucas which aims at safeguarding and highlighting the sacred woods in Europe. The project is being undertaken together with the local council of Spoleto in Italy and the French organisation Ecole D'Architecture de Toulouse.
Culture 2000 is the Commission's cultural programme and supports annual as well as multi-annual cooperation projects, thus encouraging and promoting the establishment of European cultural networks. In 2004, 209 annual projects have been selected to a total of about €18.5 million, as well as 24 multi-annual cooperation projects (focusing on the visual arts, performing arts, cultural heritage, books and reading) to a total of about €13.5 million.
The European Commission has proposed a new cultural cooperation programme for the period 2007-2013 which will concentrate on three priorities: mobility of artists and cultural workers, mobility of works and intercultural dialogue. More than €400 million have been proposed for this new programme.