#Valletta malta archive#The same is true of the food, a unique mix of Mediterranean and North African influences - which, as it turns out, is one of the more positive results of all those invasions.Įach room at Rocca Piccola - Valletta’s only palazzo that is still lived in and yet open to the public - is filled with treasures: ancestral portraits, relics from several popes, antique clocks and a massive archive of family letters. Its language has undertones ranging from Arabic to Italian, among a variety of other dialects. Valletta, like the rest of Malta, is a pastiche of historical influences. Art is increasingly moving indoors as well, with several ambitious galleries on the horizon, and MUZA, a new National Museum of Fine Arts. The area’s Baroque architecture now houses boutique hotels instead of knights in armor, while none other than Renzo Piano has refurbished the parliament and historic city gate. In Valletta, Malta’s capital, people still bring up the Great Siege with enormous pride, boasting about it as if they had actually been there.įor all of Valletta’s interest in the past - the city is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and the 16th-century Saint John’s Co-Cathedral in the center of town has been magnificently preserved - it has become in recent years a vibrant cultural destination, with an appeal that is both historic and modern. Napoleon was forced out after just two years, and the Knights of Malta - effectively, and against all odds - defeated the Ottoman Empire’s much larger forces. For the most part, the Maltese were having none of this. The Mediterranean island nation, situated between Sicily and Tunisia, counts among its unwelcome guests the Romans, the Ottomans, Napoleon and, in the early 20th century, hundreds of Russian aristocrats fleeing the fall of the czarist autocracy.
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