What Gzira Built: A Stadium, a Theatre and an Ice Cream Factory

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

Between the 1920s and the 1950s this town built things at a rate that seems improbable now. Most of them are still here, in one condition or another.

In short: a national stadium that held thirty thousand and had no grass; a theatre that hosted opera, military bands and heavy metal; the factory that made Malta’s first packaged ice cream; a college that arrived from another town and kept its name; and a chapel whose builder never asked the Church for permission.

The stadium that was the whole country’s front room

It began with a problem: football had got popular, and the Mile End ground in Ħamrun had become too small for it. The parish history credits the answer to one man — Meme Scicluna, who built the Empire Sports Ground in Gzira to take the overflow. Which is why there is a square in this town named after him.

The ground opened on 4 November 1922, inaugurated with an exhibition match between a Malta Football Association XI and the crew of HMS Ajax. It was built on land belonging to the nobleman Pietro Paolo Testaferrata Moroni Viani, on a lease arranged by his brother-in-law. A decade later Scicluna knocked down his own ground and built a bigger one: the rebuilt Empire Stadium opened in 1933 and held thirty thousand people.

Scicluna had married into the land: his wife was Elvira Testaferrata Moroni Viani, and the lease came from her brother. The first ground was formally opened by the governor, Lord Plumer, a keen football man. For the second, Scicluna went to London and commissioned stadium specialists, Messrs Marshall and Partners of Gray’s Inn. The Empire Stadium opened on Christmas Eve 1933, before it was even finished, and within weeks was full every weekend — with hundreds more watching from the roofs and balconies of the surrounding houses, and the roar of the Valletta, Floriana or Sliema end audible across the town.

It had no grass. The pitch was rolled sand, a surface visiting European sides came to dread, and for the better part of six decades it was simply where Malta played. The national team’s first international was here, against Austria in 1957. England came in 1971. Beyond football it held national celebrations and political rallies through the independence years — for a while this was where the country gathered to be a country.

It was never only football. Scicluna ran Christmas tournaments, boxing and wrestling, athletics, motorcycle and pony racing, and built a purpose-made track for greyhound racing. He brought in foreign circuses, theatre and carnival shows, and hosted Scout and Guide jamborees under the patronage of Lord Baden-Powell. In the early fifties he even tried floodlights, briefly, so football could be played at night. Through the worst of the war he kept the ground open for friendly matches, because morale mattered. Old Gzira stories include a strongman called Walker who came out at half-time to bend iron bars, and a circus elephant that panicked at the festa fireworks and bolted.

And one afternoon in particular. On 25 March 1945, before a match between a Malta XI and Hajduk Split, the band played the visitors’ anthem and then the British one — and not Malta’s. The crowd took it as the insult it was, and thirty thousand people rose and sang L-Innu Malti themselves, unbidden, in front of an embarrassed governor. The poet Ruzar Briffa wrote about it. It is one of the founding moments of Maltese national feeling, and it happened in Gzira, on a sand pitch.

Scicluna ran the place until he died in 1952, and his sons kept it on until 1962, when the forty-year lease ran out and the Testaferrata Moroni Viani family took it back and renamed it simply The Stadium. He had also been the first president of the town’s Mount Carmel band club, in 1948. His granddaughter has written of growing up close enough to see the whole pitch from the roof, and of the family dog barking at the crowds every Sunday afternoon. The last match was played on 29 November 1981.

Ta’ Qali was inaugurated in December 1980, and the Empire’s last game was played in 1981.

It has never been demolished. The main stand is still standing behind the hoardings, weeds through the terracing, the land tied up among the Testaferrata heirs and valued these days somewhere north of thirty million euro. A thirty-thousand-seat stadium, slowly going back to nature, in the middle of a town most visitors pass through without stopping.

Gżira United — founded 1947, nicknamed the Maroons — carried the name forward and have had a remarkable recent run, knocking Radnički Niš out of Europe in 2022/23 and taking a goalless draw away at Wolfsberger. They have run the Manoel Island ground since the early 1990s, where Malta once beat Libya 1–0 in the island’s only international played there.

The Orpheum: Tito Gobbi, Volare, and Black Sabbath

If one building explains why Gzira deserves more attention than it gets, it is the theatre on Triq Stuart.

The Orpheum was built in 1932 to a design by the architect Harold J. Borg, who was twenty-four at the time. A surviving photograph of it under construction shows the parish church rising behind it, still without its bell towers.

It was built properly: more exit doors than almost any theatre on the island, a dedicated door on Triq Stuart so performers could walk straight onto the stage, and — in its best years — its own electricity generator, housed where a garage now stands at the corner of Triq Carlo Manché.

And then the names, for a town of a few thousand people. The baritone Tito Gobbi in November 1949, singing alongside the Maltese tenor Oreste Kirkop, who would later take the lead in the film The Vagabond King. The tenor Tito Schipa in March 1950. The soprano Maria Caniglia that spring, with tenors Oreste Chircop and Paul Asciak. In July 1953, the Band of the Royal Marines under Sir Malcolm Sargent, billed as the Coronation Concert. Claudio Villa in 1954. Luciano Tajoli for five nights in 1955. In June 1958, Domenico Modugno singing Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu — and decades later he sang it again in Gzira, at the Empire Stadium. And in 1995, Black Sabbath.

Between the carnival balls and the opera, Gzira also had a Mercury drive-in on Triq Bouverie and, until the late fifties, the Kine Cameo on the seafront where the HSBC branch now stands.

By the sixties the Orpheum had become the cheap house — the seven-penny cinema, which local teenagers called l-Għorfa, the loft. Alterations had spoiled some of the architecture and maintenance had slipped. On a Sunday the 6.30 film would pause at the interval and one of Gzira’s many beat groups would play. The newer halls in Sliema gradually took the audience.

It passed from the Pirotta family, who lived next door with a door connecting directly into the theatre, to the Pace brothers, then to Pawlu Pantalleresco, and later to the Labour Party. It stands today, used for tombla, boxing and self-defence classes.

A building where Tito Gobbi and Black Sabbath both performed now hosts bingo. That sentence is Gzira in miniature, and it is not entirely a sad one — the building is still in use, still open most weeks. Which is more than can be said for the stadium.

The ice cream factory, and what gets saved

A few hundred metres from the stadium, on Triq D’Argens, stood the best argument in Gzira about what a town owes its own buildings.

The Wembley ice-cream factory was completed in 1937 to a design by Antonio Grech Dimech, built for Luke V. Gauci, a young industrialist newly back from studying in England. What he started there was genuinely new for Malta: the island’s first pasteurised, pre-packed ice cream, sold as Wembleys and advertised as “untouched by hand”. It went out across the island first on tricycles and donkey carts, later in refrigerated lorries.

The building was bombed twice during the war and rebuilt both times — ice cream production stopped altogether for a while, having been classified a luxury. It went back to work afterwards and ran for over seventy years, with Gauci still involved into his nineties. The architect Edward Said called it one of the best examples of pre-war industrial architecture in Malta.

It was never scheduled for protection. The Muscats Motors showroom next door was — granted protection in 2012 along with a group of other modernist buildings — but the Wembley sat on the Planning Authority’s waiting list and never came off it. A tower was proposed above it at eighteen storeys and eighty-eight metres, argued down to eleven and fifty-five. In 2019 the factory was taken down, its façade “carefully dismantled” and rebuilt into the front of what is now the Wembley Business Centre.

So the façade survives, embedded in an office block. Whether that counts as preservation is the argument this whole town is having with itself — a protected building two doors down, an unprotected one that made Malta’s first packaged ice cream for seventy years, and the difference between them a line on a list.

The school that brought its name with it

Stella Maris College has been in Gzira since 1938, and the way it got here is a small lesson in how this town filled up.

The De La Salle Brothers arrived in Malta in August 1903 and opened their first school that December, at a house called Villa Schinas on Rudolph Street in Sliema. They named it after the Sliema parish church — Stella Maris, star of the sea. Lessons began the following September with seven Brothers.

The school outgrew the house. Brother Augustine Mifsud acquired a site in Gzira, and in 1938 the college moved across — and kept the name, which is why Malta now has a Stella Maris College in Gzira and a Stella Maris church and street in Sliema, and why outsiders routinely put the school in the wrong town.

It is still here, still Lasallian, running junior and senior schools under the motto Enter to Learn, Leave to Serve. Several generations of Gzira families have gone through its gates. Its chapel opens onto Triq San Albert and holds public mass.

The chapel that nobody asked permission to build

Further down the same street, near Dar Leopoldo, stands a building easy to walk past. Set back behind iron railings, with a shallow dome and a lantern above it, its portico carries a single line cut into the stone: DARI DAR IT-TALB. My house is a house of prayer — the line from Isaiah that Christ quotes in the Temple. It is not the building’s name, though people use it that way. It is the building telling you what it is for.

The name is the Kappella tar-Redentur, the Chapel of Christ the Redeemer, and according to the local chapel record it was built entirely at the expense of one man: Albert Grixti. Work started under the architect Arthur F. Galea and was finished by Grixti’s own son, who qualified as an architect while the chapel was going up around him. It was completed in 1930.

He was Bert Grixti to the town, and local history holds that Triq San Albert carries his name as well as the saint’s. He also built a convent beside the chapel for the Augustinian Sisters, who later opened St Monica School on Triq Ponsonby.

Then the complication. No application had been made to the Archbishop’s Curia for permission to build it — so the Archbishop declined to bless it. A finished, unconsecrated chapel stood on Triq San Albert for nine years, and in 1939, as Malta prepared for war, it was leased to the government and used as a store.

Only after the war did the Archbishop relent. The chapel was blessed at last, and an arrangement made for it to be run by the Augustinian Sisters, who lived in a house Grixti had built beside it.

A man builds a church without asking, the Church refuses to bless it, the government fills it with wartime supplies, and it finally becomes what it was built to be a decade and a world war later. That is an extremely Maltese sequence of events, and it is written on a quiet street most visitors never turn down.

The shop on the Strand

Some of what Gzira built is small enough to walk past. At 178 The Strand, Emmanuel Studio has been taking photographs since around 1935 — a family business run by the Busuttils, which means it has photographed this town’s weddings, first communions and passport faces from before the war, through the fleet years, and into whatever comes next.

When the Sunday Times of Malta profiled it in July 2023, at eighty-eight years old, it called the shop a time capsule of the area’s cultural heritage, and warned that these might be its final years. A photography studio that has watched a whole town go by from the same counter is precisely the kind of place a history like this one depends on — and precisely the kind that disappears without anyone writing it down. If it is still open when you read this, go in.

One man’s promise, made in the water

The best story in the parish records is not about a building at all.

A few years after the First World War, a Maltese sailor named Carmelo Pace found himself in the water and drowning. In that moment he made a vow: if he lived, he would pay for a statue for the new parish of Gzira, which had been created only a few years before and had next to nothing.

He lived. And in 1924 the statue was made for him in Lecce, and given to the parish.

It is still carried through these streets every July. People who have no idea who Carmelo Pace was line the route to watch a promise being kept by a man who has been dead for decades — which is, when you think about it, exactly what a town is.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Empire Stadium in Gzira?

Malta's national football stadium. The Empire Sports Ground opened on 4 November 1922, was rebuilt in 1933 with a capacity of thirty thousand, and had a rolled sand pitch rather than grass. Malta's first international was played there against Austria in 1957 and England visited in 1971. Its last game was in 1981, after Ta' Qali opened. It was never demolished.

Who performed at the Orpheum Theatre in Gzira?

Among others: the baritone Tito Gobbi in 1949, the tenor Tito Schipa in 1950, the soprano Maria Caniglia, the Band of the Royal Marines under Sir Malcolm Sargent in 1953, Claudio Villa, Luciano Tajoli, Domenico Modugno singing Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu in 1958 — and Black Sabbath in 1995.

What happened to the Wembley ice cream factory in Gzira?

Built in 1937 for Luke V. Gauci, it produced Malta's first pasteurised, pre-packed ice cream and ran for over seventy years. It was never scheduled for protection, unlike the Muscats Motors showroom next door, and was taken down in 2019 — its Art Deco façade dismantled and rebuilt into the front of the Wembley Business Centre.

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.

Taħlita ta’ memorji u xi tagħrif fuq l-Empire Stadium [Memories of the Empire Stadium] — Bernadine Scicluna. Festa programme, 2019.

Empire Stadium (Gżira) — Wikipedia.

L-Orpheum u l-Gżira [The Orpheum and Gzira] — Tony Micallef. Festa programme, 2015.

L-ismijiet tat-toroq tal-Gżira [The street names of Gzira] — Bernard Scicluna. Festa programme, 2008, p. 21ff.

Il-wegħda ta’ Carmelo Pace [Carmelo Pace’s vow] — Emmanuel Magro Conti. Festa programme, 2006.

Storja tal-parroċċa tal-Gżira [History of the parish] — Parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Gzira, 1996.

The 88-year-old Gżira photography shop with secrets to tell — James Cummings. The Sunday Times of Malta, 23 July 2023.

L-istorja tal-parroċċa tal-Gżira — Joe Ian Attard. Festa programme, 2002.

Previously: The Fleet Years

Next: Faith and Feast in Gzira

Morrison Court is five self-contained apartments in a reimagined 1920s townhouse in Gzira. morrisoncourt.com.