Malta

Valletta

Valletta, the capital of Malta, is just a faint line of lights on the horizon straight ahead. I've read about Valletta a lot, often in Patrick O'Brien novels, but elsewhere as well. Also, the Port Talk last night. Allegedly, this is an exceptionally beautiful harbor, with the city rising up on the hills all around, all white and shining in the over 300 sunny days a year that Valletta enjoys. So much so that much of the talk about Valletta is about the beauty of your entrance into the harbor.

Our experiment regarding the whining noise seemed to work. Everyone involved seemed to agree that the noise was coming from the HVAC fan, so last night we just turned off the climate control. We heated the room to the max before going to bed, had a second duvet delivered, turned off the heat, and went to bed. As far as I can tell, Abbey slept all night, and I did too. It wasn't even cold in the room this morning. Problem solved?

Uh oh. Looks like today is one of the 65. Early dawn light filtering through a heavy overcast.

(Later): Not really. But first:

Wow!

We approached Valletta just after dawn, and it was gray and dark, even at full light. Valletta sits on a hill between two long, narrow bays, each of which has “creeks” (which are inlets on the bays) flowing into them, making the whole affair, on a map, look like a huge insect.

We headed for the one on the left, the Grand Harbor, which is the most extensive natural harbor harbor in the EU – 2 ½ miles long, with nine miles of shoreline. And just about every mile of that shoreline was fortified.

Valletta is, technically, a walled city. A walled Renaissance city, not medieval; most of the work was done in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.. Valletta is between the harbors, but a vast expanse of all the shoreline is defended by high limestone walls, most attached to fortifications of some sort. The land slants steeply up from the water, and in many places the cliff faces are integrated into the walls of the fortresses. The city is a hodgepodge of spires, towers, domes, small and large buildings, new and old building, arches, and plenty of walls, walls, walls.

At the whole city – and much of the cities that border the rest of the two harbors – are the same color, or the same narrow palette. The city, its walls and fortifications, are all made of native limestone, of one or two types: a hard one, and a softer one, but its surface hardens up after it's cut or worked. They are, for lack of better terms, light beige and dark beige. So everything in sight, all around the harbors, is, if not the same color, then very close. The slight variations, I think, really make looking at the city very interesting.

So – not white. Not anywhere.

We sailed through the breakwater and into Grand Harbor, then stopped, turned around, and backed up the passage to our dock. This gave the dozen or so of us who had come out on the top deck to get a first glimpse of Valletta, the grand visual tour, and it was spectacular. Even on a gray, overcast day.

I'm at a loss here, because I can't describe it the way I want to, and the pictures don't do it justice. You have to see it all at once. It's overwhelming. If you squint just a little bit, not much, you can see the sixteenth century, the city of stone built by the Knights of Malta,* who, in 1565, held off a siege of Ottoman Turks who vastly outnumbered them. After four months, the Turks left, and Turkish invincibility moved from established fact into the realm of myth.

It's not hard to see how this city could take care of itself. I'm glad we have a map that shows us how to get through the walls and up into the city.

After breakfast we loaded onto the buses and drove to Sliema***, one of the towns on the other harbor, and boarded a red sightseeing boat – an included tour – along with about a million of our fellow-travelers. Seemed like it, anyway, We did a slow, comprehensive tour of both harbors, with narration that I could get about 50-60% of because of the accent and the quality of the PA system. But the clouds were thinning out and things were getting brighter. And there were lots of interesting things to see. The architecture is by no means uniform; even the 400+ year old fortifications were built at different times by different people, and Malta endured

3,300 bombing raids during WWII. But there's enough tying it together to make it one big beautiful city, and enough variation to make it richly interesting. We passed marina after marina, with boats big and small, and some with yachts that our guide said cost at least 100 million dollars each. There were shipyards and drydocks, and houses with ancient balconies with peeling paint, and arches and tunnels and weird, Star-Wars-like watchtowers (left, foreground) facing out to sea. Some people seemed to be living in the walls themselves. There were lighthouses, and little gondola-like water taxis flitting from one shore to the other. And, of course, enormous cruise ships – two, including ours, docked, and one in drydock – and ferries galore. It was a wild, chaotic, beautiful, stately, jumbled, unified, magical realm of water and rock. And when the sun came out, it was something entirely different.

Bighi Naval Hospital (1675)

When we sailed from one harbor to the other, and then back again, we had to go out into the sea to get around the point, and the boat was thrown around a bit. That was exciting.

The sun came out when we returned, and we ate lunch outside, taking our time. We remarked on how hot the sun was. Then we watched some dark clouds come over from the other side of the city, and soon it was raining (I finished my ice cream; Abbey took hers under cover). Then it was cooler and breezy for the rest of the day, with the sun in and out of silver, gray and white clouds. So – a sunny day? What're the criteria?

At the moment, late afternoon, the sun is bright on the peninsula which ends in one half of the breakwater (bottom of page); seeing it lit by the sun, golden in the afternoon light, with the Mediterranean and its distant cumulus, is breathtaking.

We have an odd problem. As you know, we have no euros, for reasons. It hasn't been a problem up until now. But to get to the old city of Valletta – which we can see clearly from our balcony – you either take a big (ugly) outside elevator, or walk a really long way up steep streets, and then a long way down. We'll be in Valletta until 1 PM tomorrow, and we'd like to see the city.

The only problem is that the elevator costs one euro each. No credit cards. If we can't get two euro - worth, this afternoon, $2.33 – we can't go up to Valletta. Or, technically, Abbey could, if she left early and moved fast; my knees and arthritis would make it too painful. And there's a famous Caravaggio in a cathedral up there!

Long – long! - story short: we went to Guest Services and Eugene, the guy who has been helping us with the whining noise went through all the options, and finally went to his desk and gave us two euro. Problem solved. We'll find a currency exchange up in town and bring him back two euro and something nice. Thanks Eugene!

As the sun sinks, the angle of light changes, and you get that effect when one side of an impressive building or tower or muscular shoulder of a castle is lit up, and the other side is in shadow. And the light, at this time of day and on stone the color of Valletta, is golden. There's a lot of that this afternoon, while we have tea and finger food in the Winter Garden.

Dinner was in the other specialty restaurant. It features Italian food and it was very good. My whole dinner was seafood, which I don't often get to do. Spicy sauce, very good linguine. Abbey went heavy on the seafood, too, and added minestrone, which, she noted, was just very good, not exceptional. Are we getting jaded?

We watched a program of folk dances and songs of Malta in our room, which were performed in the theater but streamed live. Kind of generic; nothing distinctive or memorable. The women all made their costumes, which involved lace.

I'm up to the 19th century in “50 Ships that Changed the Course of History.” Very interesting, but it's not true that they all changed history. Some did; others are just interesting.

Off to bed. Waking up in Valletta in the morning.

* - The Knights Hospitalier were actually involved in the famous Siege; the Knights of Malta and the Knights of St. John were also based in Malta at other times and involved in the long (centuries), contentious struggle for the central Mediterranean. I haven't been able to straighten out who was here, doing what, when, yet.**

** - Duh. Turns out the Knights of St. John and the Knights Hospitalier and the Knights of Malta were all the same thing.

*** - 'Sliema' means 'peace' in Malti, the Maltese language, which is a combination of Italian, Arabic and English, which, the longer you think about that, the weirder it gets.