La Valette
La ValetteUne capitale entière sur moins d'un kilomètre carré : églises baroques, bars à vin en sous-sol et la paroisse de grand-mère.
Ce guide est pour l'instant rédigé en anglais. L'essentiel est traduit.
Le lieu aujourd'hui
Valletta is a city you cross on foot in twenty minutes, which is roughly how long it takes to bump into three people you know. Mornings are the best of it: coffee and warm pastizzi (flaky ricotta pastries) from the kiosks, delivery trolleys clattering down Republic Street past Caffe Cordina (founded 1837, on Republic Street since 1944), church bells arguing with each other. About 5,000 people still actually live here, many of them elderly, in flats behind the painted wooden gallariji (closed balconies) that make the streetscape, joined lately by boutique-hotel guests and a younger crowd that rediscovered Strait Street, once the sailors' red-light strip, now the spot for a late negroni. Locals lunch at Is-Suq tal-Belt, the covered market, or take a ftira (Maltese flatbread roll) down to the Lower Barrakka Gardens. In the evening, when the cruise groups thin out, cross the Grand Harbour by dgħajsa (traditional water taxi) for a couple of euro and look back at the city the way it was meant to be seen.
Comment il en est arrivé là
Valletta exists because of a battle. After the Knights of St John survived the Ottoman Great Siege of 1565, Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette laid the foundation stone of a new fortress city on the Sciberras peninsula on 28 March 1566, to a grid plan by the Italian military engineer Francesco Laparelli, finished by his Maltese assistant Girolamo Cassar, who went on to design most of its early landmarks, including St John's Co-Cathedral (1572–1577), later given its gilded interior and two Caravaggios. The Knights ruled from here until Napoleon evicted them in 1798; the British arrived in 1800 and made Valletta the Mediterranean's naval nerve centre. That drew the Luftwaffe: in April 1942 bombs flattened the Royal Opera House, whose ruins Renzo Piano folded into an open-air theatre when he rebuilt City Gate and the new Parliament (2011–2015). UNESCO listed the whole city in 1980; in 2018 it served as European Capital of Culture, which is when half the scaffolding finally came down.
Itinéraires qui y passent
La Valette aux premières lueurs
Arrivez avant les paquebots et regardez le calcaire prendre une teinte de miel.
Les Trois Cités, au-delà des remparts
Traversez le Grand Harbour en dgħajsa, vers les cités où l'histoire de Malte a vraiment commencé.