Gozo – the doting biography
Gozo, a portrait of an island by Daniel Cilia and Iggy Fenech published by Gozo Regional Council, 2020
Giovanni Bonello
If you know of any book on these islands more visually stunning than this, please let me know. I don’t. This one is an almost aggressive extravaganza of colour, the fairyland where chronicle and aesthetics coincide, a tsunami of nostalgia.
[attach id=1009614 size="medium" align="right" type="image"][/attach]
Daniel Cilia, perhaps the most prolific and creative among a rich series of creative and prolific camera artists, has dredged his seemingly inexhaustible archives of images to put together, in one cohesive narrative, the most memorable pictorial accounts of Gozo’s geography, history, folklore, passions, a destiny past and an awareness present. The portrait of an island, sure, but, perhaps more importantly, a guidebook into being Gozitan. The visual element overwhelms by far the printed word.
Deliberately sparing and economical, author Iggy Fenech banned verbosity and focussed on focus. Very little, if anything, not wholly essential was allowed to capture the narrative.
Several authors have anyway already been generous with writings about Gozo – there is...