Valletta is the capital city of Malta. It was built as a fortified city on the Sciberras Peninsula after the Great Siege of 1565. The fortifications were designed by Francesco Laparelli; the foundation stone of the city was laid on 28th March 1566.

I arrived in Valletta very jet-lagged after about 20 hours of travelling and my first impressions are fairly chaotic. I arrived at the hotel by taxi at high speed and had to wait some time to check in to the hotel, along with Martin and his bicycle (see The Hotel) as there was nobody at the reception desk.

As it was almost lunch time when I checked in I wandered up to Republic Street for lunch and then decided that I would spend a couple of days getting to know the city before I ventured into the countryside. My daughter was arriving five days after me so I had plenty of time.

I had a list of "things to see" given to me by a Maltese friend and I worked my way through them.

The first stop was Sapienza's Bookshop on Republic Street which was just around the corner from my Hotel and which I visited many times during my stay and then on to Cordina's Cafe for lunch. As well as the inside tables, Cordina's shares alfresco dining with Eddie's Cafe Regina. You can tell which cafe owns which tables by the colour of the umbrellas - red for Eddie's and Brown for Cordina's.

I visited the Great Siege Exhibition which I found disappointing and walked around the walls, checked out the bombed out opera house and vainly tried to find my way to a small cafe in St John's Bastion which looked very pretty. You can just pick it out on the right of the bastion; you can see an umbrella if you look closely.

St John's Bastion with a small cafe just to the right of it.

I eventually asked a friend about it and he told me how to find it.

This is the view from the cafe to the City Gate and St James' Bastion

Near the entrance to the tunnel which leads to the cafe I found this - the only acknowledgement in the city of the engineer who designed the fortifications and the city itself.

On St John's Bastion

The city itself is build on Mt Sciberras and is uphill almost wherever you want to go. Republic street, which is the main street, runs from the city gate to fort St Elmo along the spine of the peninsula and the streets slope down to the harbours on each side of it. Originally, I suspect, the streets were made up totally of shallow limestone steps but now there are only a couple of streets of steps and the rest retain the them only as footpaths. They have been polished smooth over the centuries and are dangerously slippery; I fell once before I realised that the middle of the road was safer.

Triq Zekka and the dome of the Carmelite Church. The street is very steep.

I spent a morning at the Museum of Archaeology after collecting my tickets for the Hypogeum. There was one couple rushing from display case to display case and writing in their notebooks. I suspect that they didn't look at the displays but only at the labels and unless it was some sort of treasure hunt it seemed a very odd way to spend their time. A lot of the original carvings and sculptures from the temples are now housed in the museums with replicas on display at the actual temple sites.

My daughter and I spent almost the whole of the week she was there trying to get into the Grand Masters' Palace but it was closed for all but one day and then it was full of tourists on guided tours - but at least we saw it.

Neptune's Courtyard at the Grand Master's Palace

During my time alone I took myself to the Armoury and the Museum of Fine Arts, things which she didn't want to see. I also did a tour of the Manoel Theatre, which she probably DID want to see, and the Sacra Infermeria which was the 16th Century hospital of the Order of the Knights of St John.

The bombed-out Opera House kept as a memorial to the bombing of Malta in WWII

My main impression of Valletta is that of a beautiful old city cluttered up with sunburnt tourists and cars parked in every available space - the Opera House and the Great Ditch being prime examples of that particular brand of pollution. I took the above photograph early on a Sunday morning and managed to find the Opera House with only a few cars parked in it.