Alchemy is another hotspot, serving cocktails made with ingredients such as mushroom gin and mastiha liqueur. Nowadays it pulses with nightlife, locals spilling out onto the cobbles for alfresco drinks, or else heading to Trabuxu to sip Maltese wines beneath 400-year-old vaults. He points out Strait Street, or ‘The Gut’, where prostitutes once cavorted with drunken sailors. “Malta is almost the Middle East, but not quite almost Africa, but not quite almost Italy, but not quite.” “And it’s all wrapped around baroque architecture and megalithic temples older than the pyramids,” he says. From May 2023, the former BBC journalist will be offering small-group tours of Valletta’s dark side, with stories of witchcraft, murder and the naughty Knights of St John.Īs we wander through the twisting backstreets, Mario tells me how familiar Malta is to British travellers: the sense of humour, driving on the left, telephone boxes. EU investment has raised standards and given locals the incentive to open bars, restaurants and clubs.”ĭiving into the less-explored corners of Malta’s history, Mario’s tours forego the usual tourist spiel and draw on obscure sources, including death certificates, police reports, rare books, Vatican archives and even Roman Inquisition records. “Now there are glitzy cocktail bars next to sushi restaurants and high-class steak houses. If you saw a handful of people on the main street at 10pm, it was a lot,” says Mario Cacciottolo, guide and founder of Dark Malta Tours. Honey-stone houses have been spruced up with brightly painted gallariji, the eye-catching wooden balconies that are perfect for spying on neighbours and trapping the winter sun.īut this revival started even earlier: in 2014, Italian architect Renzo Piano put Valletta back on the map with his City Gate project, redesigning the main entrance to the fortified city, with a new gate, open-air theatre set in the ruins of the old opera house, and a striking new parliament building – nicknamed ‘the cheese grater’ – with a pixelated, fretted façade echoing the island’s starkly eroded coastline. Since it seized the European Capital of Culture reins in 2018, boutique hotels, cafés and cocktail bars have been taking root in Renaissance palazzi. Shadows deepen and lights flicker on in the old town.īack on dry land, Valletta has become cooler than ever. As we approach St Elmo Bridge, Sunday bells peal from domes and churches, reverberating across the Grand Harbour. “It was the backdrop for Baelor in Game of Thrones and Ridley Scott is filming Gladiator 2 there,” he says, voice muffled by the breeze. “Over there is Manoel Island and its star fort,” shouts MC Adventure guide Massimiliano, pointing his paddle at its formidable bastions. Malta’s charms are many, and Valletta has “film set” written all over it, too – and producers have cottoned on, too. Wind and spray whip me as I dip my paddle into the choppy sea, passing cliffs where fishermen stare into the silver distance and boys leap into watery depths to raucous cheers. Malta’s capital is impressive at ground level, but, seen from a kayak, it is astonishing. Along the way it passes many of the great monuments, including St John's Co-Cathedral.Valletta’s limestone fortifications glow in the late-afternoon light, as high and impenetrable as when the Knights of St John built them in the mid-16th century. Valletta's backbone is Republic Street, which runs from City Gate – where the tourist office is located – to Fort St Elmo on the tip of the peninsula. The Knights believed having straight streets would make their fortress city easier to defend. The city has been awarded Unesco World Heritage status because of its unique characteristics and historic importance – for example, as the first European capital city to be laid out on a grid pattern. He never lived to see the city completed, but it was named in his honour: Valletta. Their Grand Master, Jean de Vallette, decided to build a near-impenetrable citadel on the peninsula on the opposite shore. The Turks attacked again but the knights survived the Great Siege of Malta in 1565. They moved on to Malta, which at the time was sparsely populated, and established a city at Vittoriosa – facing present-day Valletta. For two centuries they lived on the island of Rhodes, but were driven out by the Turks early in the 16th century. The Mediterranean has brought wave after wave of civilisation, creating layer after layer of history, but the origins of Valletta rest with the Knights of St John: this Christian military order of European noblemen began by caring for pilgrims to Jerusalem.
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