Visit to Malta (2): Valletta
On a Thursday afternoon, our flight from London Gatwick to Malta’s Luqa Airport on a British Airways Airbus A319 took 2 hours 50 minutes. We are staying at the Hotel Osborne which is conveniently located inside the oldest part of the capital Valletta. It was towards 10 pm when we reached the hotel but we still went out for a quick orientation and refreshment walk of an hour and a half. On the main pedestrianised thoroughfare of Republic Street, we found a little restaurant where Silvia had a large glass of red wine and Roger gorged himself on the sweetest cake he had ever come across, a Sicilian delicacy called cassatella.
Friday morning was a walking tour of Valletta with an excellent guide named Audrey-Marie Bartolo (there were only six of us in the group). Even the guide book describes Valletta was “Malta’s Lilliputian capital” since it measures a mere 600 metres by 1000 metres which, of course, makes it eminently walkable.
Starting at 9 am, our first stop was – logically enough – the National Museum of Archaeology. Here it was explained to us that Maltese history starts almost seven millennia ago with the arrival on the island of the first inhabitants (probably from Sicily) in 5200 BC. The Ggantija Temples date back to 3600 BC which makes them the oldest free-standing buildings in the world (for comparison, Stonehenge in England dates from 2600 BC). The most outstanding exhibit in this fascinating museum is the so-called ‘Sleeping Lady’, a red terracotta carving of great detail that goes back to 3200 BC.
Next stop was St John’s Co-cathedral which our guide insisted was “one of the most beautiful churches in the world”. It was built between 1573-1578 by the Order of the Knights of St John who ruled Malta from 1530-1798 and the ‘co’ in the title stands for ‘continuation’ since it was actually the second cathedral to be built on the island. As well as an imposing central altar, there are eight elaborately-decorated chapels – four on each side. The pride of the cathedral is found in the Oratory: two huge paintings by Caravaggio – ‘The beheading of John the Baptist’ and ‘Saint Jerome writing’.
After a half-hour refreshment break in Piazza Regina, the tour continue with a visit to the 16th century Grand Master’s Palace, historically the home of the leader of the Order of the Knights of Malta (there were 28 in all, most of them French). We viewed the Tapestry Room, the Dining Room, the Grand Council Chamber and other ornate rooms. Currently the Maltese Parliament of 69 members meets in the Grand Master’s Palace but a new parliament building of controversial design is close to being completed. Finally we were taken to the Upper Barrakka Gardens, originally created in the late 16th century, for splendid views if the Grand Harbour of Valletta. The weather was hot and there was not a cloud in the azure sky, so it all looked magnificent. Our guide left us at 12.40 pm.
In fact, as we enjoyed our tour with Audrey-Marie, we learned a bit about her. She is actually from the island of Gozo where around 30,000 of Malta’s 410,000 citizens live. Surprisingly people of Gozo speak a version of Malti which is hardly intelligible to other Maltese. Audrey-Marie has been an extra in a number of Hollywood movies shot locally including “World War Z” and she showed us a group photograph of her with the film’s lead actor Brad Pitt (in fact, Pitt and Angelina Jolie are in Gozo now filming their latest movie).
We had the afternoon free and Roger & Silvia started with a salad lunch on Merchants Street. Then we walked down to something called “The Malta Experience”. This is an audio-visual show accessible in no less than 13 languages which takes just 40 minutes to cover the 7,000 years of Maltese history. It was very informative, but Roger was disappointed that it did not find time to mention the Norman King Roger who arrived in Malta in 1127.
After the “Experience”, we had a tour of the Holy Infirmary with a guide called Anna Giusti. This hospital, run by the Order of St John, admitted its first patients in 1574 and the main ward, which is 155 metres long, could accommodate up to 330 beds. It was remarkably modern for its time – disinfected instruments, rapid amputations, toilets in the wards – and the survival rate of patients was 72%. One of the illnesses treated was syphilis for which the sufferer was administered mercury which cured the illness but paralysed the patient. As Ann put it: “One night with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury”.
Anna – like Audrey-Marie – was immensely proud of her country’s history. She told us: “Geographically speaking, Malta is at the very edge of Europe. Historically, it is at the centre.”
In the evening, Roger & Silvia went out for dinner and chose a restaurant called the “King’s Own Band Club” located on the main thoroughfare of the city, Republic Street, but it turned out to be less than a total success. Silvia ordered spaghetti alle vongole (clams) and, as the young waiter was about to place it in front of her, he managed to tip the plate so that hot oil split over her top and jeans. Roger chose Malta’s favourite national dish which is ‘fenek’ (rabbit), but it was very boney, the salad came a quarter of an hour after the meat, and the chips came a quarter of an hour after the salad. When we found that we could not pay the bill by credit card, our exasperation finally burst through and the waiter gave us complimentary drinks of limoncello.