The Island That Named the Town: Manoel Island, the Lazzaretto and Forty Days

Part of Gzira Histories, a continuing series on the town’s past.

Gzira means island in Maltese, and the town is named after something that is not the town: Manoel Island, lying just off its shore in Marsamxett Harbour. That is a strange way for a place to be named, and it tells you where the story starts. For most of recorded Maltese history this stretch of coast was unremarkable foreshore. The thing worth naming was out in the water.

In short: the island was Church property, known as the Bishop’s Islet, until the Order acquired it in 1643 in exchange for land inland. It became Malta’s quarantine station — every arriving ship and passenger spent forty days there under a code enforced by flogging, the galleys and in some cases death. In 1723 Grand Master de Vilhena added a star fort, and the island, and eventually the town opposite, took his name.

The Bishop’s Islet

The island had earlier names — l’Isolotto, the little island, and il-Gżira tal-Isqof, the Bishop’s Islet, because it belonged to the Cathedral of Malta.

Before the quarantine buildings there was already something on it: a small chapel dedicated to St George, the island’s only structure for a long time, and the first sign that this scrap of rock in the harbour was considered worth consecrating.

In 1592 plague arrived. Grand Master Verdala had a temporary quarantine hospital thrown up on the islet, where the sick could be isolated by water rather than by walls. The word lazzaretto comes from St Lazarus, who in the tradition was himself stricken and cared for the plague-ridden.

The logic held, and the Order wanted the island outright. On 18 July 1643 the Knights and the Cathedral agreed to exchange it for a parcel of land at Il-Fiddien, inland near Rabat. The contract was drawn that same day before the notary Lorenzo Grima. A permanent Lazzaretto in stone followed under Grand Master Lascaris.

It was tested within a generation. The plague of 1675 killed around eleven thousand people in nine months, and Grand Master Cotoner enlarged the Lazzaretto in its wake; Carafa and de Vilhena extended it again, adding warehouses so that cargo could serve its forty days alongside the passengers.

Forty days

For the next three centuries this was Malta’s front door and its filter, and the system was far stricter than the modern word suggests.

Quarantina is simply the Italian for forty. By enforced law, every vessel and every passenger entering Malta spent forty days on this island before being allowed ashore. Not some. Every one.

An Englishman touring the lazzarettos of Europe in 1785 recorded Malta’s as sixteen rooms over two floors. The eight lower apartments opened onto a gallery above the sea. There were three courtyards: two for travellers and their merchandise, and a third for herds of cattle imported from the Barbary coast. And there was a place for burying the dead, and a separate place for burning the bodies of those who died of plague.

Across the water, on the St Michael bastions of Valletta, loggias were built by Stefano Zerafa so that people serving quarantine could shelter beneath them and hear Mass celebrated in the chapel of Santu Rokku above. You could attend church, in other words, from the wrong side of the harbour.

The Profumatur

Every ship and everything aboard it was fumigated. There was an office for it and an officer — the Profumatur, who worked alongside the Guardians of Health. Both were chosen personally by the Grand Master and sworn in by solemn oath, and their duties were set out in Grand Master de Rohan’s legal code, because what depended on Malta’s Lazzaretto was not only the health of the Maltese and the Knights but that of Italy and the Christian states nearby.

They perfumed travellers at the start of quarantine and again two days before it ended. They went through luggage, boxes and everything else, and were required to search for whatever might be hidden from them. Even incoming mail was fumigated — the thinking being that a letter could carry contagion as readily as a man.

The penalties tell you how seriously it was taken. A guard who failed in his duty over quarantined merchandise could be sentenced to ten years at the oars of the Order’s galleys. Escaping, or removing goods without permission, could be punished by flogging or by death, depending on gravity. So could trading with a ship in quarantine.

In 1700, eight people escaped. A decree followed: anyone who helped or hid them would serve three years rowing on a galley if a man, or six years’ exile from Malta if a woman — and the same applied to anyone who knew where they were and did not say.

And on the walls, generations of people serving their forty days carved their names. Some of the inscriptions go back to the years the building went up.

The fort, the engineer, and the name we still use

In 1723 Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena decided the islet should do military work as well as medical.

It could have been far more. Among the proposals the Order considered was an entire walled city on the island — a second Valletta across Marsamxett. The Grand Council chose a fort for five hundred men instead. Had it gone the other way, the town on the shore opposite would have grown up in the shadow of a capital rather than a garrison, and almost nothing in this series would have happened as it did.

De Vilhena was a popular Grand Master and a confident one. Soon after his election an Ottoman admiral sent him an insolent letter demanding the surrender of the island; he ignored it, and the fleet sailed away without landing. He built the Manoel Theatre in Valletta, raised the Jesuit college to a university, gave Floriana its walls and its second name, Città Vilhena — and received from Pope Benedict XIII the blessed sword and hat that popes sent to defenders of Christendom. The fort was of a piece with all that.

The design went to the engineer De Tigné, who worked on the principles of the great French military engineer Vauban, and who shaped a fort that five hundred men could hold. It was named Fort Manoel for the Grand Master, and a bronze monument to him was set at its entrance — the same monument that stands today in Floriana. When Vilhena died in 1736 and was commemorated in St John’s, the base of that monument was cast with an image of him inspecting the building of this fort.

He also built a governor’s house and a church, completed in 1727 — the first finished building in the fort — and dedicated to St Anthony of Padua, his patron and a fellow Portuguese. Who designed it is disputed: one parish history credits Romano Carapecchia, while others point to Charles François de Mondion, the fort’s engineer, who called it “una chiesola bellissima” and asked to be buried in its crypt. He was, on Christmas Day 1733.

It was no garrison chapel. At de Vilhena’s request, Pope Benedict XIII made it a parish in 1728 — a military parish of the Order, outside the bishop’s jurisdiction altogether — with its own parish priest, two confraternities, a crypt for their dead, and relics including a fragment of the True Cross. Two masses were said every day: one for the soldiers before the fort’s gates opened, and one later for anyone. Under the British, when Catholic regiments were stationed in the fort it served as a church again, and when Protestant ones were, it became a school.

Its first parish priest, Dun Mikelanġ Pisani, was appointed in January 1729. The body of a martyr, San Generoso, lay in its high altar; side altars were added through the 1750s by confraternities and private donors; and an inventory taken in 1780 by the last chaplain lists silver chalices, monstrances, vestments in every liturgical colour and ten brass candlesticks on the high altar alone. Almost none of it survived the French. During the occupation of 1798 to 1800 Napoleon’s troops worked through Malta’s churches stripping silver and gold to be melted down and minted into pay for the garrison — and they held Fort Manoel itself.

The Luftwaffe hit it in March 1942 and brought most of it down. After the war a Royal Navy captain, Eric Brockman — who commanded HMS Phoenicia, the naval base moored beside the island, and had married a Maltese woman — tried to rebuild it with sailors and dockyard volunteers — and the workmen clearing the crypt began reporting a figure watching them: a knight in black, resembling the Favray portrait of de Vilhena himself. Several of them saw it. It stopped, the story goes, once the crypt was cleared and the naval chaplain said mass there on Christmas Eve.

The chapel was finally rebuilt in 2009, with the rest of the fort. The original altarpiece — St Anthony adoring the Christ Child, probably by Giannicola Buhagiar — survived the war, was rediscovered decades later in the sacristy of Our Lady of Victory in Valletta, and now waits for restoration in Heritage Malta’s laboratories at Bighi. The one above the altar today is a printed reproduction.

And in December 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Gzira’s new parish priest was installed there rather than in the parish church — almost certainly the first time in the parish’s century that the ceremony happened anywhere else.

So the sequence runs: a Portuguese Grand Master, to a fort, to an island, to the town on the shore opposite.

The most famous people ever to be bored here

The Lazzaretto’s guest list is better than any hotel’s on this island, for the simple reason that nobody arriving by sea could avoid it.

Lord Byron was quarantined here and left a line of complaint that has outlived most of his admirers: “Adieu, thou damnedest quarantine.” Sir Walter Scott passed through. So did Benjamin Disraeli. Thackeray spent seventeen days shut up in Fort Manoel. During the Crimean War the complex became a military hospital for British, French and Italian wounded, each contingent in its own ward, after the British enlarged it in 1837–38 under Governor Sir Henry Bouverie — who has a Gzira street named after him.

John Henry Newman, the future cardinal, served his quarantine here in 1832–33, years before his conversion to Catholicism, and spent it writing poems and letters home to his mother and sisters.

The genuinely eminent were sometimes spared altogether. When the Turkish Ambassador came in April 1669 he was lodged at Villa Sarria in Floriana rather than on the island. An English ambassador to Constantinople was given the same courtesy in 1686, and died there a few days later anyway.

Think about that from the Gzira shore: for three hundred years, the people of this coast watched the sick, the celebrated and the merely unlucky sit out their weeks a few hundred metres offshore, close enough to shout at and forbidden to land.

De Vilhena’s bronze statue had a long journey of its own. It stood in the fort’s square until Governor Le Marchant had it moved to Valletta in the 1850s, then shifted again to make room for Queen Victoria’s monument, and now stands by the Mall in Floriana. His tomb in St John’s, by the Florentine sculptor Massimiliano Soldani Benzi, shows him discussing the plan of Fort Manoel with an angel holding it up for him.

The Lazzaretto stands today, empty and unrestored.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Lazzaretto on Manoel Island?

A quarantine station. From 1592 the Knights isolated suspected plague cases on the island, and a permanent stone Lazzaretto was built in 1643 under Grand Master Lascaris. Every vessel and passenger entering Malta spent forty days there before being allowed ashore. It later served as a military hospital during the Crimean War and stands empty today.

Why is it called quarantine?

From the Italian quaranta, forty — the number of days every arrival was required to spend in isolation. The word lazzaretto comes from St Lazarus, who in tradition was himself stricken and cared for the plague-ridden.

Who was quarantined on Manoel Island?

Among others, Lord Byron, who left behind the line 'Adieu, thou damnedest quarantine'; Sir Walter Scott; Benjamin Disraeli; and the novelist William Thackeray, who spent seventeen days shut up in Fort Manoel. The genuinely eminent were sometimes spared — the Turkish Ambassador was lodged at Villa Sarria in Floriana in 1669 instead.

Sources and further reading

This post draws on the following. Most are articles from the annual festa programmes of the Gzira parish and the Mount Carmel band club, digitised and freely available in the University of Malta’s OAR@UM repository; Maltese titles are glossed in English.

L-istorja tal-Gżira [The history of Gzira] — Parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Gzira. 75th anniversary publication, 1996, pp. 10–13.

L-istorja tal-Gżira — Joe Ian Attard. Festa programme, Għaqda Mużikali Mount Carmel, 2001.

Il-Lazzarett fil-Gżira Manoel [The Lazzaretto on Manoel Island] — Joseph Sant. Festa programme, 2015, pp. 29–30, after Paul Cassar, A Medical History of Malta, pp. 299–303.

Il-Knisja Parrokkjali ta’ Sant’Antnin fil-Forti Manoel [The parish church of St Anthony in Fort Manoel] — Ivan Said. Festa programme, 2026.

Manoel Vilhena — Arturo Bonnici. Leħen is-Sewwa, 26 August 1972.

Manoel Island — Wikipedia.

Next in the series: How Gzira Became a Town — an arch, a road and a thrown stone.

Morrison Court is five self-contained apartments in a reimagined 1920s townhouse in Gzira, ten minutes’ walk from the bridge to Manoel Island. morrisoncourt.com.