Images by Alfred Vella Gera

Giovanni Bonello's sixth volume in the Nostalgias series focusses on Alfred Vella Gera, a banker with a passion for capturing the essence of Malta, its people and its chronicles, on film.

Vella Gera (1901-1989) became an active photographer and film-maker in the 1920s and his production turned out to be truly vast. Many of his images he published in postcard format, though substantial numbers remained in his private archive. The author includes in his book over 250 of these images, many of them seen by the public for the first time here.

This book is an invaluable memory of the Malta and Gozo we no longer know. Many of the cityscapes and panoramas can today be identified by the younger generations only with considerable effort. Vella Gera also took an interest in current events and readers will have a golden opportunity to keep and cherish a record of important events, ranging from carnivals to funerals, from political satire to epoch changing events. In this series of volumes Bonello has made sure that posterity will still be able to participate in the splendour and fascination of an era now no more.