Bridging the gaps

The Maltese do not think of bridges as objects of beauty, writes Norbert Ellul-Vincenti:

So this morning, on one of my usual early walks across the spectacular Valletta Waterfront (much credit there to the builders), I notice that after long months of late re-structuring, the bridge across the new mouth of the inland water has been laid. It is steel, straight and plain. What a fool I was to expect something to feast the eye. This is Malta. We don't go in for bridges of poetry. We just lay the planks across. The result was exactly as I had feared while nursing a glimmer of hope.

Perhaps we should have taken a page from the new Archbishop's book. Mgr Paul Cremona has gone on record as saying that he thinks he is a good bridge-builder. Bridge-builders and fence-menders are experts that greatly benefit society, though it must be admitted that fences may hedge people separately rather than bring them together. They use tact and good-handling to bring people into harmony. But bridge-building is something that we in Malta have not taken much to heart, since we consider the exercise as simply one of getting people and merchandise from one place to another over a drop or ravine. We are crassly utilitarian.

We do not think of bridges as possibly being objects of beauty. The Italians do, the Spanish, the Swiss and the Germans, but not we. The highways of Italy, in particular are remarkable for the number of spectacular and poetic bridges that cross them, or that the roads themselves cross. Simply slapping down a horizontal slab of metal grid or concrete passage never occurs to the Italians as sufficiently beholden to eyes bred on beauty.

Not in Malta. We go for the cheapest and the most humdrum, with the hateful expression that betrays our mediocrity, on our lips or in our thoughts: "Mhux xorta?" (It's all the same). Mhux xorta? is always on our tongue. "Xorta l-ilma bahar," we say, recognising that mediocrity does not get you anywhere beautifully. We require more than zalzett and hobz biz-zejt to exist. We crave beauty. Man does not live by bread alone...