Europe’s smallest capital is surprisingly impressive

Seven wonders of Valletta, Malta

What Europe’s smallest, UNESCO World Heritage-listed capital, with a population of less than 6000, lacks in size is amply compensated for in its wealth of impressive and historical attractions.

1 Visit Valletta’s stunning cathedral museum

St. John’s Co-Cathedral and its spectacular walls and ceiling.Credit: iStock

St John’s Co-Cathedral, built by the Order of the Knights of St John in 1577, is an obvious and stirring starting point. Dedicated to St John the Baptist, the order’s members over the centuries donated the finest works of art to this gloriously gilded church, an official national treasure. Today it’s run as much as a blockbuster, revenue-generating museum and art gallery enterprise as it is a place of worship.

2 View Caravaggio’s Maltese masterpieces

Caravaggio’s “Beheading of John the Baptist”.Credit: Alamy

Michelangelo Merisi, better known as the painter Caravaggio, arrived in Malta in 1607 on the run after killing a man in a brawl in his native Italy. While on the island he painted The Beheading of St John the Baptist, a masterpiece that not only has pride of wall space inside St John’s Co-Cathedral but is the subject, along with another precious Caravaggio, St Jerome Writing, of a superb new EU-funded digital presentation which explains and interprets the works in minute and fascinating detail.

3 Marvel at the Grand Master’s Palace

Nearby to St John’s, as most everything is, and facing St George Square, is this newly restored, 450-year-old Grand Master’s Palace with its impressive wraparound dark green timber gallarija or Maltese-style balcony (see below). It was the first building to be constructed by the Knights of St John in the new capital city of Valletta and once housed Malta’s first constitutional parliament under British rule. Today the seat of the office of the president of this tiny Commonwealth nation, 85 per cent of rooms, corridors and courtyard are open to visitors.

The Courtyard of the Grand Master’s Palace.Credit: Alamy

4 Follow suit at the Palace Armory

The Armoury Museum.Credit: Alamy

The Grand Master’s Palace also houses an astonishing armoury museum with the exhaustive collection regarded as one of the world’s finest, The Armoury collection, which showcased the Order of St John, defender of the Roman Catholic faith against the Ottoman Empire, is breathtaking in scope. Virtually every available centimetre of its large main space is dedicated to precious exhibits such as the suits of Grand Masters Alof de Wignacourt and Jean de Valette, Ottoman armour and weapons and artillery pieces.

5 Create your own balcony scene

One of the genuine delights of a Valletta visit is its array of colourful gallarija, decorative closed timber balconies. Highly photogenic, gallarija are believed to have originated in nearby North Africa with the Maltese introducing their own versions in the 17th century as a means of brightening the facades of public and private buildings. Many balconies feature multiple small hinged windows with the particular season dictating how many of them are opened to the street at any one time.

Street scene with balconies in Valetta.Credit: iStock

6 Enter the city’s true underworld

Malta was the staging post for “Operation Husky”, the World War II invasion of the island of Sicily, which at its closest point is only 100 kilometres or so from Valletta. An intricate network of tunnels deep below Valletta was begun by the British in 1940 to defend the island and were expanded in 1943 to accommodate the Allied headquarters under Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe. Today the extensive and well-preserved Lascaris War Rooms, as the tunnels are known, offer visitors a unique subterranean glimpse of Malta at war.

Inside a War Room.Credit: Alamy

7 Pause for a Piano lesson

Malta’s parliament and its honeycomb exterior.Credit: iStock

Valletta has few contemporary buildings, with the most recent addition a compact and controversial Parliament House designed by the renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano and opened in 2015. Next to the capital’s historic City Gate, the building was criticised for its cost, design and a belief that it denied Valletta vital open space. However, for the casual observer, it’s difficult to comprehend the fuss with this handsome and sympathetic contemporary building’s unusual facade intended to represent not a “cheese grater”, according to its detractors, but honeycombs inspired by Malta’s name deriving from “melite” meaning honey.

The writer visited Valletta as a guest of Viking Cruises and its 16-day “Malta, Morocco & the Mediterranean” itinerary. See vikingcruises.com.au; visitmalta.com