Villa Bologna in Attard
Villa Bologna is a Maltese stately home, built in 1745 in the village of Attard by Fabrizio Grech as a wedding gift for his daughter.
It is as interesting for its history as it is remarkable for its opulent Baroque style architecture and gardens. The villa is constructed on a basic quadrilateral plan, the footprint of which is approximately 440 metres2. Nonetheless, there are numerous wings and extensions to the main building, some of which even antedate the main building itself.
The front (east) façade is a triumph of Mediterranean Baroque architecture, featuring elaborate expressions of the Baroque idiom and including a large balcony that runs along the entire length of the front façade. The idiom is grandiloquent but the proportions are so excellent that the viewer is not overwhelmed by the monumental size of the villa.
Villa Bologna is a palatial country house typical of the Mediterranean Baroque. Though regally splendid in its own right, it is through its gardens that it acquires a character that is absolutely unique in the annals of Maltese architecture.
The New Garden was laid out by Lady Strickland after she married Lord Strickland in 1926. An Englishwoman, Lady Strickland came from a culture that reveres gardens and, being extremely wealthy in her own right, she was able to indulge her passion for gardens by letting her imagination run loose on the grounds of Villa Bologna. Thus, assisted by her friend, Count Giuseppe Teuma Castelletti, she laid out large gardens along the western side of the villa. She greatly increased the acreage of the estate, bringing the total up to around 7.3 acres.
Such was the scale of her work in the garden that in the 1930s she was employing 16 gardeners working full-time 10 hours a day, 6 days a week
The Baroque Garden is the old garden of the villa, laid out at the time of the construction of the villa in the 18th century. These gardens are typical of the Baroque in Italy at that time, with a symmetrical layout set around cobbled pavements with pillars bearing stone pots of all kinds. The garden was originally planted with all sorts of citrus trees, especially orange trees. Later on, especially during the days of Lord Strickland, lawns were added and exotic trees, including palm trees, as well as other types of fruit trees were planted