2 Liri Francesco Abela

Francesco Abela was a 17th-century Maltese historian and knight of the Order of St. John whose 1647 work Della Descrittione di Malta is considered the foundation of Maltese historiography. Malta's 1974 commemorative silver program used figures of this kind to assert a distinct national cultural identity in the years immediately following independence from Britain in 1964 — a deliberate projection of Maltese intellectual heritage on coinage rather than reliance on colonial or religious iconography.

The .987 fineness used across this series is notably purer than the .925 standard common to most contemporary silver commemoratives.