Bormla

2005 is a special year for the people of Bormla (Cospicua) as they celebrate the centenary of the Immaculate Conception Painting Coronation. Preparations have started for huge festivities culminating on the 25th of June. From the Cospicua parish website:

The parish church stands majestically on the hill, where, according to pious
legend, the Blessed Virgin appeared to free a little child from the devil’s
clutches. A true gem and a rich repository of artistic treasure, the present
parish church is renowned for sumptuous silver artifacts, such as candlesticks,
apostle motifs, missals, antependia, a monstrance packed with diamonds and a
refined monstrance throne, its artistically executed altarpieces and the
gold-embroidered velvet altar cloths that adorn its numerous altars on feast
days. Besides its titular altarpiece, this church also flaunts several other
paintings by well known past masters, notably Alessio Erardi, Gian Nicola
Buhagiar, Francesco Zahra, Rocco Buhagiar, Virginio Monti and Giuseppe Cali`,
who painted the remarkable figures of the four main Old Testament Prophets on
the pendentives underneath the main dome, and the pictures on the vault of the
nave.

Tradition asserts that the original processional statue of the
Immaculate Conception was sculpted in wood around 1680 by Suor Maria De
Domenicis, a Carmelite Tertiary and a pupil of Mattia Preti and later on in
Rome, of Carlo Maratta, head of the Accademia di San Luca. She carved the statue
from the trunk of a carob tree, on which Our Lady is said to have appeared.

Cospicua photographs