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Reinventing Valletta
Travel feature with a historical overview...
"Napolean Bonaparte swaggered through this foyer, and Lord Horatio Nelson used to dock his ship outside," said Caroline Borg, introducing me to the Casino di Venezia on the Vittoriosa waterfront in the Three Cities. "The number of great men who passed through this building is impressive." Now Malta's sister outfit of the famous Venetian casino is luring a different sort of visitors with equal swagger.
Originally built in the late seventeenth century to a design by Lorenzo Gafa, the Captain's Palace first directed the Knights' formidable naval fleet and later (1800-1979) the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. Its baroque architecture, framing the fa‡ade into bays divided by panels, exudes confidence and fearlessness. The delicately restored interior evokes the grand gesture suggested by the exterior. The foyer with its barrel-vaulted ceiling opens into the loggia-framed former courtyard, and a palatial staircase leads to the first floor whose airy rooms, which overlook the tranquil water, have now been covered by brocades of lavish baroque plumes - red, blue, golden - where you'll find the table games. Everything - the quietly triumphal lion insignia moulded in green glass, the exuberant flower arrangements, the warm brown-red marble floor with white veins in abstract patterns, the triple coats of arms of Venezia and Vittoriosa and the Maltese Cross in stained glass and luminously suffused with electric light, the massive chandeliers of wrought-iron and crystals - everything suggests a solemn allegiance to combative swagger. The first floor smelled of rich fabric and Tequila.
Opened for business in August 2001, the Casino di Venezia is the first landmark of the Cottonera Waterfront Project, a complex consisting of a yacht marina, high-class hotel and apartments, expensive shops and restaurants, all spread round Dockyard Creek. Elsewhere round the shores of the Grand Harbour, the concerted effort to reinvent Valletta and the Three Cities has resulted into new cafes and bars, some excellent restaurants, a cinema, and an art gallery for modern art. This year, work is scheduled to begin on the Valletta Master Plan, an ambitious rebuilding programme set to recreate the pompous entrance into Valletta, coupled with, on the city's eastern flank, a new port of waterways and gardens and shops for cruise liners calling at the harbour.
For the first time in thirty years, Valletta is attracting a discerning crowd for its vibrant bohemian culture and nightlife.
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"A City built for gentlemen." That was the stated mission of the Knights of Malta in 1566 when the construction of the new city of Valletta commenced from scratch, mobilising 8,000 workers. Victory in the Great Siege of 1565, when the Knights against all prognoses halted the territorial might of the Ottoman Empire, had shamed Christian Europe into promising funds for the fortification of Malta. The Pope sent his engineer Francesco Laparelli to design the new city. Laparelli's innovative plan outlined a city laid on a grid pattern of streets to encourage natural ventilation, and defended by a 100-metre-high girdle of fortifications. To maintain high standards, the detailed planning brief stipulated how much would be spent on each house; moreover, every corner house had to install some sort of decoration, mostly shrines dedicated to Catholic saints. In little time the Knights erected the Grand Master's Palace, the Conventual Church (now St John's Co-Cathedral), and seven palaces as their inns of residence. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Knights immortalised their self-image of power by embarking on a baroque makeover of Valletta, and the construction of a spate of churches plus the National Library and Manoel Theatre. They flaunted their wealth in the hospital, which served the sick from dishes and cutlery of solid silver.
Meanwhile, across the harbour in the Three Cities - Vittoriosa, Cospicua and Senglea, sprawling over and around the two peninsulas jutting into the Grand Harbour - the Knights ran the best naval academy in Europe and the most formidable naval fleet in the Mediterranean. The Spanish recognised the severest storms as "those which only the galleys of Malta could weather." Shipbuilding, the harbour trade, and state-sanctioned piracy (aimed at debilitating the Muslim presence in the Mediterranean) generated prosperity. Several sets of fortifications sealed the Three Cities from attack, among them the two semi-circular walls that corral the Three Cities on the land-front, the Margarita Lines and the massive Cottonera Lines, whose ten bastions took 54 years to built. Under the British, the Grand Harbour continued to thrive; the Royal Navy expanded the docks and based the headquarters of its Mediterranean Fleet in the Three Cities. Strait Street in Valletta became the epicentre of Malta's nightlife: a narrow street thronged by revellers, especially the merry sailors on shore leave, streaming in and out of the bars, dance halls and brothels.
Throttling across the water in a small traditional wooden boat in a sunny day, I could understand what puts the `grand' into the Grand Harbour. The view of the 2.5km-deep harbour was ever changing, each turn revealing one of its eight creeks. At the Malta Drydocks in French Creek, the limbs of the eight-storey cranes cluttered the horizon and the stout hulk of the oil tankers and cargo ships made us seem like beleaguered pranksters. On every side, the panorama was fairytale: baroque towns built on the crests of fortifications, the shapes defined by fortifications, dense clusters of worn limestone buildings (with hint of North African medinas) timber balconies, domes, spires, colonnades, loggias, clock-towers. The stone sentry lookout posts on the bluffs of the fortifications looked like cheerful thumbs-up.
After World War II, however, the Grand Harbour region lost its economic momentum. As the British Empire rapidly shrunk and Britain slashed its defence spending, the dockyard tumbled into recession; many naval buildings were abandoned. Valletta and the Three Cities, once so futuristic, had now also aged - their infrastructure creaked under modern capacities, the streets suddenly too narrow for the increasing traffic volumes, the houses damp and cramped. Young people started migrating to the new towns springing up in the suburbs, where they could enjoy larger houses and wider roads. Sliema and St Julian's snatched over the capital's nightlife and entertainment, emerging as the swanky resorts in the fledgling tourist industry, and the only people that stayed on in the Grand Harbour region were the working class who could not afford to join the exodus. The towns round the harbour became the most economically and socially depressed area in Malta, with the highest prison population. The capital, one of the world's greatest cities and elected by UNESCO as a World Heritage City, became deserted as the last of the office workers straggled home and the shops closed for the night. The floodlit buildings made the emptiness more emphatic and hollow. The cultural blackout lasted thirty years.
The tide started rolling back just over five years ago when the emergent middle classes, the new cultural elite, trickled back into Valletta for its bohemian architecture. They bought and renovated the old townhouses that had lain abandoned. Property was cheap too, as the 27-year-old Lorna Borg found out three years ago. Borg's house in St Ursula Street, a staircase-street where the clattering of kitchen dishes and bellowing of mothers' voices echoed through the shade, has a tight fa‡ade, though it spreads over three storeys. The renovation, which cost Lm8000, saw the replacement of the chipped tiles, the creation of a lush bathroom and kitchen, the whitewashing of the walls, and the installation of a loft in the top floor that made an intimate bedroom. It's a cosy house brimming with bric-a-brac and framed pictures of Maltese quaint scenes. The lighting is sensitive, and the expensive traditional-style tiles blend well with the New Age mementoes. (Borg almost sold her house recently for a clear profit; someone round the corner paid Lm100,00 for a harbour-view house.)
At around the same time, the opening of a new cinema and the rehabilitation of St James' Cavalier into an arts centre - an art gallery comprising eleven halls, a theatre in the round, and a small cinema-theatre - injected cultural vigour into the city. When I visited St James Cavalier I gladly noted that Anna Grima's frames, in the exhibition titled The Way of the Heart, expressed the fluid themes of divinity and purity - a timely and fitting exploration, in a wider significance, of Valletta's renaissance as city of culture. The abstract helixes, triangles, squares, circles and other geometric designs, distinctly influenced by the spiral motifs of Malta's Neolithic Era, were woven of warm earth colours and reds toned by black swabs. A sense of enigma, which is how we relate with them via the instinct of inner knowledge and intuition. In the main hall, with its elegant barrel-vaulted ceiling, Anna Ciavola's ceramics were also fluid in their shapes and smooth warps. Made of fired clay, and their colours bleeding with sand, sawdust and enamels, there were dozens of beautiful jars and wall pieces. St James Cavalier is absorbing in its own right; it was built by the Knights in the 1570s, a pentagonal tower with thick walls whose function would be of a rearguard gun emplacement in the event of an invasion. Its barrel-vaulted halls are connected by mysterious tunnels, and the restoration, designed by Richard England, retained the original construction while adding more intricate and geometric spaces, like the extra interior shrines of a temple hollowed after the initial construction. The sense you get is that art is the new religion. No longer the city of the crusading Knights, no longer the city of naval glory, but the city of art, Valletta's latest bid.
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"There wasn't a decent evening bar, so we got this idea, and it is working very well." That was Anthony Scicluna, who opened Caf‚ Jubilee in November 2000 to find ready crowds. It has British old-pub-style flock wallpaper covered by a mosaic of curio prints, and lit by baroque lamps. The clutter of mahogany-style furniture and tables, the collectibles on shelves, the ceiling plastered by newspaper cuttings - all add to the sense of fullness, making the bar seem naturally busy. The music is well paced. Caf‚ Jubilee's success spurred the latest addition to Valletta's nightscape, the music bar Maestro E'Fresco which opened in November 2001. It has an elegant feel, the walls sponged earth auburn and sea blue, with darkly varnished wooden furniture, its decor highlighted by a couple of oak panels on which indigenous American totem-poles and South American symbolic figures are burned. A curvaceous piano and collection of other instruments - bongos, tambourines, guitars - are set on a pedestal, ready for the live music that crackles in the evenings. It is doing well too, packed tight on weekends. The restaurants don't complain of poor business either. Patrick Cuschieri, who runs The Carriage, told me that it had been a wise move when he relocated from Sliema to Valletta. "Given Valletta's old world character, I thought we would belong here. And it's harder for someone to build on top of us, which is what squeezed us from Sliema to Valletta originally," Cuschieri explained.
The new bars and restaurants have found a crowd that hankered for something more genteel than the dumb inebriation of St Julian's. It's a culturally-conscious, educated and middle class clientele, the kind of people who like to drink where the music is a little more varied than the current commercial fads, and where there's life beyond the conquest of sex.
Now everyone is waiting eagerly for the Valletta Master Plan, scheduled to start this year (there have been previous failed plans). The design by the Italian Renzo Piani and the Maltese Richard England extends the baroque character while incorporating modern styles. Expected to cost Lm40 million, it's Valletta's largest building project since the war, set to burrow the bus station underground, lower the plaza outside the city walls to reveal the majesty of the fortification, rebuild the city gate and bridge spanning the dry moat to their original floridity, reconstruct Freedom Square into a motif of circular architecture, and erect a new National Theatre in the ruins of the British Opera House destroyed in the war. Although the government has yet to do a better job at cleaning and many buildings remain abandoned, the initial signs from the Cottonera Waterfront Project across the harbour are encouraging: already, 44 out of the 110 luxury apartments currently undergoing construction have been sold for around Lm97,000. In a year, the yacht marina is expected to provide docking for over 250 yachts.
Casino di Venezia have shown how the old could be blended with the modern to good effect, and the renewal of the Grand Harbour region is exactly forward looking and aesthetically smug because it is morphing modern architecture into the old styles in seamless continuities. To complete the historical circle, 200 years after Napolean ended their complacency in Malta the knights have come back. At Fort St Angelo, Malta's oldest fort dating to the thirteenth century, the twin flags of Malta and the knights symbolise the historical continuity. Now a charitable organisation, the knights have reoccupied the fort for their spiritual weaning and politico-cultural studies.
The End
Where to Stay:
Among the handful of accommodation options in Valletta, the British Hotel (Tel 21 224730) and the Grand Harbour Hotel (Tel 21 246003) are both cheap, small hotels situated in St Ursula Street, a picturesque residential area. Some of the rooms in the latter boast excellent views of the Grand Harbour; both hotels are basic, with exteriors of bland aluminium doors and interiors of cheap furnishings - they are best considered as budget bases. A level up, the Castille Hotel (Castille Place; Tel 21 220173) has wide staircases and larger rooms that pay more attention to the d‚cor. The Osborne Hotel in South Street (Tel 247293) has recently been refurbished without impinging on its Old World charm; it's a friendly hotel and although the rooms are a bit worn out, they have en suite bathrooms, phone, airconditioning and TV. There are no accommodation outfits in the Three Cities.
Where to Eat and Drink:
One of the best restaurants in Valletta is The Carriage (Valletta Buildings, South Street; Tel 21 247828; Open Mon-Fri noon-3.30pm, Fri & Sat also 7.30-11pm), an elegant French restaurant that is notorious for its ravioli, frequently changing the stuffing, such as ricotta and pumpkin. Main courses include the excellent roast game pie wrapped in filo pastry and served with a cognac-based sauce - the best game dish I've ever had. On a different vein, Rubino (53 Bakery Street; Tel 21 224656; Open Mon-Fri 12.15-2.30pm, Tue & Fri also 7.45 - 10.30pm) specialises in Mediterranean cuisine, particularly concocting the Maltese dishes at the professional cutting-edge of Maltese cuisine. Examples include two traditional Maltese dishes: pulpetti, the meat balls pan-scorched and then simmered in wine and herbs and stock, and a dense tuna pie, deeply flavoured. In the Three Cities, you'll find the professional edge of modern Italian cuisine at Buccintoro (Tel 21 805580; Daily 8.30pm-midnight, later Fri-Sun) on the top floor of the Casino di Venezia, which rates among Malta's top Italian restaurants. For starter, the tagliatelle with game had a creamy consistency bound by mushrooms, and for main course, deer with mushrooms and juniper berries and red wine was tender and excellent, the taste of juniper explosive and complementary.
Caf‚ Jubilee at 125 St Lucy Street is open daily 8am-1am. Maestro E'Fresco on South Street is open Mon-Sat 8am-1am; they feature live music, piano and guitar and bongos and keyboard plus vocals, between Tuesdays and Saturdays 8-10.30pm. Labyrinth, set in a beautiful house on Strait Street, is an absorbing art gallery, antique shop and caf‚ plus restaurant rolled into one, with weekly live pianist feature.
Entertainment:
Embassy Cinema (reservations Tel 21 222225) at St Lucy Street features commercial Hollywood movies. St James Cavalier at Pope Pius V Street features rotating art exhibitions, occasional theatre events, and airs arthouse films every evening; for enquiries call 21 223200. The theatre season at Manoel Theatre (Tel 21 246389) runs from October to May.
© Victor Paul Borg
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