The urban, cultural, and political profile of the Maltese islands is deeply marked by the presence for 268 years of the knights of St John. The Order has left its mark decisively in the collective memory of the Maltese.
Malta û The Order of St John gives a global picture of this multinational institution in those crucial years when Grand Master L'Isle Adam moved the convent from Rhodes to Malta, when legendary Grand Master Valette withstood the Turkish assault in 1565, when Grand Masters Wignacourt, Cotoner, and Carafa turned Malta into a centre of Mediterranean corsairing, and Grand Masters Vilhena and Pinto tried to imitate the Central European absolutist princes. It all came to a sudden û but not unexpectedly û end in 1798 when Grand Master Hompesch handed over Malta to the rising star on the European horizon, Napoleon. The various diplomatic attempts of the knights to regain their island all failed. The book also provides the reader with an overview of the most important monuments connected with the knights on Malta and Gozo.
Photographer Daniel Cilia was born in Gozo, Malta in 1963, and has been pursuing photography since he was thirteen. Self-taught, he learnt the technical aspects of photography, and more importantly realized how light shapes and forms our visual perceptions of everyday life. Cilia has always insisted that photography is not about equipment but its all about the quality of light and how it modulates three dimensional objects.
His first major exhibition was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Valleta, Malta in 1986, and in the same year he was awarded the Licentiate of Royal Photographic Society. Soon after he left his nursing profession and transferred to Florence, Italy, to pursue his career in photography. Cilia has since lectured at the National college of Arts, Crafts, and Design in Oslo, Norway (1989), and was in charge of the Photographic Department of the Art Institute of Florence, Lorenzo de Medici, from 1990 to 1995. His work has been exhibited and published in many countries.
In the last twenty years, Cilia has specialized in editorial photographic design, with more than seventy books about the Maltese islands and their history, to his credit.
In 2008 Cilia was awarded the prize for the best designed book (Gorgeous Gozo) by the National Book Council (Malta). In the same year he was presented with the Award of Recognition for his contribution to Photographic Art in Malta by the Malta Institute of Professional Photography.
In 2009 he was bestowed the knightly title Croce pro Merito Melitensi, by Fra' Matthew Festing, Grand Master and Prince of the Sovereign Military Order of St John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and Malta, in recognition to Cilia's work in relation with publications about the Order.