Anthony Zammit: The Maltese Master Craftsman Who Carves History into Stone

Appreciation: Anthony Zammit – the quiet force who put Maltese craftsmanship on the world map

Valletta’s morning light is still spilling over the limestone balconies when the workshop door on Old Bakery Street creaks open. Inside, wood-shavings curl like miniature ħobża crusts and the air smells of beeswax and sea-salt. For forty-two years this has been Anthony Zammit’s cathedral – a place where chisels sing louder than church bells and where a block of Maltese globigerina limestone is coaxed into breathing.

To passers-by he is simply “Ninu l-ħajt” – the man who once carved a coat-of-arms so fine that Queen Elizabeth paused her motorcade outside the Palace in 2005 and asked to meet the hands behind it. To the artisans of Strait Street he is the mentor who sneaks pastizzi into their rucksacks before they catch the 5 a.m. ferry to Carrara for training. To restorers in Rome he is the phone call that starts with “X’għandna llum, ħi?” and ends with a solution for a 16th-century chapel crumbling faster than Maltese summer ice-cream.

Born in 1958 a stone’s throw from the Marsa shipyards, Zammit grew up watching British dockworkers swap Players cigarettes for his father’s hand-whittled model dghajjes. The family didn’t own a television; the living-room altar was a slab of quarried stone and a set of inherited chisels. At 14 he left school to apprentice with the master-carver Ġużeppi Delceppo, learning the old rule: “Qabel tqaxxar, tisma’ l-ilma” – before you peel the layers, listen to how the stone drinks the rain.

By 1982 he had restored the decorative corbels of the Grandmaster’s Palace after a botched cement job threatened to turn UNESCO red. In 1996 he spent 18 months in Gozo reconstructing the façade of the Xewkija rotunda, using only photographs taken by RAF pilots in 1942. Each night he cycled back to the quarry at Ta’ Ċenċ, flashlight taped to his helmet, to select blocks whose grain matched the weathered parish stone. “You don’t impose your ego,” he told the Times then. “You apologise to the rock and ask it to forgive the chisel.”

But Zammit’s greatest legacy is not marble or limestone; it is people. In 2003 he convinced the Education Ministry to let him convert a disused Valletta bakery into a free evening school. Since then 312 students – carpenters, dockers, even a retired policeman – have learnt to turn rough-hewn blocks into lace-like balustrades. Thirty-seven now run their own studios from Birżebbuġa to Mosta, keeping the craft off the endangered-skills list that Brussels waves at Mediterranean member states.

Tourism Malta likes to boast that the islands are an “open-air museum”, yet every guidebook photo of carved wooden balconies or ornate church altars is, in some way, a footnote to Zammit’s syllabus. When cruise-ship passengers photograph the newly restored Auberge de Castille façade this summer, they will snap the invisible signature of a man who refused to let Malta’s Baroque skin wrinkle into dust.

Age is catching up; arthritis has bent his index finger into the shape of a sickle. Still, he clocks 5 a.m. starts, humming traditional għana while sharpening chisels his grandfather forged from WW2 tank treads. Last month he turned down a lucrative contract in Dubai, choosing instead to spend three weeks mentoring teenagers on a Żejtun housing-estate project carving a monument to local wartime heroes. “If we chase only the big wallets,” he says, “our story becomes someone else’s souvenir.”

On 8 September, Festa season, the community of Żabbar will unveil a new niche of Our Lady carved entirely by Zammit’s former pupils. They have asked him to sign the base, but he declined. “Let the stone speak,” he insisted. Yet if you linger after the band marches away and the confetti settles like coloured snow, you can still spot him – cap pulled low, fingertips brushing the folds of the Madonna’s robe, checking that her smile carries the same quiet resilience as the island that shaped him.

In a Malta racing towards high-rise glass and crypto-casino skylines, Anthony Zammit is a stubborn grain in the oyster, reminding us that identity is not downloaded but chiselled – one patient strike at a time.