Valletta, Malta

Greetings from Malta! Neither of us had visited the island before, so we took an all-day tour, to hopefully see and learn as much as possible. My mother will blog about the sights we saw in the morning, so I’ll write a little here about our lunch and travels in the afternoon.

After visiting Mdina and Tarxien in the morning, our group ate a lunch of typical Maltese cuisine. I don’t know about you, but before today I had no idea what Maltese food was like! The buffet had many cold or room temperature salads, including olives stuffed with meat, sausages cut up with sun-dried tomatoes, marinated mushrooms, chickpea paste, red lentil paste, shredded carrots and red cabbage in a vinaigrette, and a hard, feta-like cheese encrusted in black pepper.

After lunch, we returned to Valletta, which is where the Emerald Princess was docked. Valletta, the capital of Malta, is named after La Valette, the first Grand Master of the Knights of Malta who founded the city when the knights took over the island in the 16th century.

The stamp of the Knights of Malta is all over the island. The distinctive Maltese cross appears on banners and in carvings everywhere, and nowhere more than inside the Co-cathedral of St. John in Valletta. On the outside, the building is quite plain, but the interior of the cathedral is completely covered with sumptuous, gilded decoration and furnished with precious objects, many of which were gifts sponsored by the island’s knightly rulers.

The downtown area in Valletta is mostly pedestrian only, and the streets and buildings are all made of distinctive limestone. The climate in Malta is very arid, so even though it was cloudy all day, it never rained, and the city all looks like a dry, dusty beige. Valletta was heavily bombed during World War II, so many of the buildings have been reconstructed. The photo below shows the columns remaining from a famous opera house that was destroyed. The city has recently decided not to rebuild the opera house, but instead to turn it into an outdoor amphitheater, which they’re currently in the process of building.

Malta is also an interesting place because of its unique language. Maltese is a member of the Semitic language family, related to Hebrew and Arabic, and it’s the only such language that is written with the Latin alphabet. Check out the sign below for an example of the same sentences in English and Maltese, as well as a convenient diagram reminding visitors not to pitch themselves from the city walls.

Finally, here’s a panoramic view of the harbor as we were sailing away. Farewell to Malta!