First, remove the cars.
Then the tarmac. Then the road markings.
Now put back the orange trees.
You are beginning to see Lija’s Belvedere Tower as it was meant to be seen.
Today, it stands on a roundabout along Transfiguration Avenue, an unusually elaborate companion to the passing traffic. It is easy to admire through a car window and even easier to misunderstand. A watchtower, perhaps? A surviving piece of some larger fortification?
Neither.
This tower was built for pleasure.
In 1857, the Marquis Depiro and his family commissioned Maltese architect Giuseppe Bonavia to create a belvedere within the gardens of Villa Gourgion. Surrounded by orange groves and landscaped grounds, it offered the family and their guests a place to relax and enjoy the view.
Its job was not to keep people out or spot trouble approaching.
Its job was to make an afternoon more agreeable.
That distinction gives the building its charm. On an island so often introduced through bastions and defensive towers, here is a structure with no military assignment. It belongs to the world of garden walks, private leisure, and architecture created because somebody wanted something beautiful to look from and something beautiful to look at.
Architectural historian Conrad Thake describes it as an architectural capriccio, a playful invention taking the form of a recreational lookout tower. It was a garden feature with ambition.
Then, almost a century later, the setting changed.
In 1956, the government expropriated extensive parts of the villa’s gardens to create a broad avenue. The new road cut through the historic grounds. The belvedere stayed where it had always stood, but its relationship with everything around it was transformed.
A retreat became a traffic landmark.
That is the detail worth holding on to when you visit. The tower was not placed in a roundabout as an extravagant piece of street decoration. The road arrived around it.
Once you know that, the scene becomes strangely compelling.
You begin mentally filling the gaps. Where might the garden paths have run? How much greenery once separated the tower from the villa? What would it have felt like to approach through trees rather than along a pavement?
The questions make the building more interesting, not less. You are looking at a surviving fragment of a landscape that no longer exists in its original form.
It also changes the way you photograph it.
Frame the tower tightly, and you can almost recover the fantasy: ornament, pale stone and an elegant silhouette against the sky. Step back and include the road, and you tell another story entirely, about a village changing around something it chose to keep.
Both photographs are true.
That tension is what makes the belvedere worth seeking out. It is beautiful, certainly, but beauty alone is not the whole attraction. Its setting asks you to look twice. Something feels unexpected before you even know why.
A restoration completed in 2021 brought renewed attention to the landmark. Yet the most revealing part of a visit does not require an elaborate explanation or a long itinerary. It requires knowing what used to surround it.
Make it a pause on a walk through Lija, rather than a photograph taken hurriedly from a moving car. Find a safe viewpoint from the pavement and take in the whole arrangement. Check access information separately if you hope to enter, rather than assuming the tower is routinely open.
Then try the exercise again.
Remove the traffic. Restore the trees.
For a moment, the tower stops looking misplaced.
The road does.
