The Xewkija Rotunda, a church built around another church

The story behind the Xewkija Rotunda moves me more than the dome itself. No grand master or government paid for it. Around 3,000 villagers, most of them fishermen, farmers and builders, funded it and put it up themselves, and they did it without pulling down the church they already had.

A church built around a church

After the Second World War, Archpriest Ġużepp Grech won approval to replace the old parish church, consecrated in 1755, because Xewkija was growing by around a hundred people a year and had simply run out of room. The architect, Joseph D’Amato, took his cue from Santa Maria della Salute in Venice. The catch was that the old church had to keep holding services while the new one went up around it, so the masons were quite literally building one church inside another.

One Ministry for Gozo page dates the first stone to 1951, while another describes the ceremony on 4 May 1952, with the bishop escorted into the village on horseback. What’s certain is that work began in the early 1950s and took 18 years.

How a village paid for it and built it

This is the part that gets me. The village raised £18,000 plus another £2,000 in gold jewellery, much of it given by women, and the archpriest made house calls every week to collect. Farmers and fishermen handed over part of what they produced, and Gozitans who had emigrated sent money home.

On 16 July 1964 the concrete ring that carries the dome was cast in a single day. It took 1,300 sacks of cement, 2,600 of sand and 5,200 of crushed stone, hauled up by pulley from five in the morning. The men took the day off work, and the women cooked on site and helped lift the sacks.

D’Amato died before the job was done, and the dome was finished by master mason Ġużepp Vella, chief mason for 14 years. The Ministry describes him as a genius at geometry who couldn’t read or write. The structure was completed on 31 May 1970, when Vella himself set the cross on top of the lantern.

The measurements, and why I skip the league tables

The dome stands 75 metres high with a circumference of 85 metres, and its weight is put at about 45,000 tonnes. For the width, one Ministry page says 27 metres and another 28. Eight stone-clad concrete columns hold it up. Inside, local stone does most of the talking, with a polished Carrara marble floor, fine sculpture, stained glass and recent paintings of the saint’s life by Paul Camilleri Cauchi.

The parish bills it as the third largest unsupported dome, in the world on one page and in Europe on another, and the Mosta Rotunda makes similar claims of its own. Those claims contradict each other, so I don’t repeat any of them. For comparison, Mosta publishes an internal diameter of 39.6 metres on its website.

What to see inside the Rotunda

The bit I wouldn’t miss is the Sculpture Museum. Every stone of the old church was numbered before it came down, then reassembled beside the new building, so you can get close to the lace-like carving Gozitan masons did in Maltese limestone. From the museum a lift runs up towards the dome, with views over the whole island and, on a clear day, across to Malta.

Neither the Ministry nor the parish publishes opening hours or a price for the museum or the lift on the pages I’ve read. As with any working parish church, services come first, so I’d go on a weekday morning and leave some slack in the plan.

The 1978 consecration and the feast

The Rotunda was consecrated on 17 June 1978, the parish’s 300th anniversary, when twelve marble crosses were blessed and fixed to the walls. The feast of St John the Baptist falls on the Sunday nearest 24 June, and that’s when the church looks its best, with the whole village dressed up. If you’re touring the south of the island, pair it with the cove at Mġarr ix-Xini, down the valley, and the rest of the things to do in Gozo.

Where it fits in a day on Gozo

The Rotunda sits on the road from the ferry, so it makes an easy first or last stop. I’d come off the boat at Mġarr, spend the first hour of the day here, when the church is quietest, and carry on to Victoria. On a longer stay it works just as well at the end of an afternoon walking the valley, when the evening light falls on the dome.