The human adventure in Malta begins around 5900 BC, when the first farmers crossed over from Sicily, some 90 kilometres to the north, probably in canoes loaded with seeds and animals. But what put Malta on the map of world prehistory came later: between 3600 and 2500 BC, a Neolithic society built a series of monumental limestone temples that are the oldest free-standing structures still standing on the planet.
Ġgantija, on the island of Gozo, was built around 3600 BC; its name means 'of the giants', because Maltese people in later centuries could not believe that human hands had moved blocks weighing more than fifty tonnes. Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra, Tarxien and others followed. They predate Stonehenge by about a thousand years and the pyramids of Giza by some five hundred. Seven of these temples now make up the UNESCO site 'Megalithic Temples of Malta'.
It pays to be precise with the superlative: for decades they were called 'the oldest free-standing structures in the world', and they still are, but the discovery of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey (older, though different in nature) calls for some nuance. What makes the Maltese temples unique is that they form a coherent, long-lasting architectural tradition. That culture vanished abruptly around 2500 BC (famine, soil exhaustion or migration have all been suggested), and the archipelago was left empty, or nearly so, until Bronze Age people arrived.
Around 800 BC, Phoenician seafarers from Lebanon set up colonies and ports of call on the islands, making use of their deep bays and their position on the Mediterranean trade routes. According to the most widely accepted etymology, the country's very name dates from that period: from the Phoenician or Punic 'malat', thought to mean 'refuge' or 'harbour', a reference to the archipelago's natural anchorages.
With the rise of Carthage, the Punic power of North Africa, Malta came into its orbit around the 6th century BC. The Carthaginians left tombs, inscriptions and sanctuaries. One of the most famous Maltese finds, the 'Cippi of Melqart' (two pillars bearing a bilingual inscription in Punic and Greek, one now in Malta and the other in the Louvre), served in the 18th century as the Rosetta Stone that made it possible to decipher the Phoenician alphabet.
During the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome, the islands were a piece on a larger board. In 218 BC, at the start of the Second Punic War, Rome took Malta. It was the beginning of a period that would last for centuries and leave the islands firmly anchored in the Latin world.
Under Rome, Malta (Melita) thrived as a prosperous and fairly autonomous municipium, with villas, mosaics, olive oil production and a textile industry famous for its fine cloth. The Roman imprint is still visible in the Domus Romana in Rabat, with its mosaic floors, and in the early Christian catacombs of St Paul and St Agatha.
The episode that Maltese tradition regards as its founding moment took place around AD 60. According to the Acts of the Apostles, the apostle Paul, a prisoner on his way to Rome to stand trial, was shipwrecked off the coast of Malta during a storm. He is said to have stayed three months on the island, to have survived a viper bite unharmed and to have converted Publius, the Roman governor, later regarded as the island's first bishop. That is why Malta claims to be one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, with a devotion to St Paul that runs through its whole culture.
As befits an account of faith handed down by a religious text, historians distinguish between the literary account and its verification: the shipwreck and the stay are narrated in Acts, but even the exact location (the traditional St Paul's Bay or other spots) is a matter of scholarly debate. What is beyond dispute is the cultural weight of the episode: it shaped Maltese Catholic identity for two millennia. After the division of the Empire, Malta fell within the Byzantine orbit from the 6th century.
In AD 870, an Aghlabid army from Ifriqiya (present-day Tunisia) took Malta from the Byzantines. The Arab-Muslim period, which effectively lasted until the 11th century, was short compared with others but decisive, because it gave rise to what makes Malta linguistically unique in Europe.
The Arabs reorganised agriculture, introduced irrigation systems and crops such as citrus fruit and cotton, and above all their language. Modern Maltese descends directly from Arabic, specifically from a Siculo-Arabic variety related to the dialects of the Maghreb. It is the only language of Semitic origin that is an official language of the European Union, and the only one normally written in the Latin alphabet. Over the centuries it absorbed a huge amount of Italian, Sicilian and English vocabulary (about half of its lexicon), but its grammar and most basic words are still Arabic. Place names such as Mdina (from 'medina', city) or Rabat reveal that origin at a glance.
There is a legitimate historical debate about the continuity of the population: some studies suggest that the island was left empty, or nearly so, after the conquest and was later resettled, which would explain the complete language shift; others argue for greater continuity. What is certain is that neither later Christianisation nor centuries of Latin rule erased the Arabic basis of everyday speech.
In 1091, the Norman Count Roger I of Sicily landed in Malta and subdued the islands, bringing them into the Christian, Latin sphere of the Sicilian kingdom. At first the conquest was more nominal than real (the Muslim population remained for generations), but it set the course: Malta would stay tied to Sicily and southern Italy for the next four and a half centuries.
Under the Normans and their successors (the Swabian Hohenstaufen, the French Angevins and, from 1282, the Crown of Aragon), Malta was a peripheral fief that passed from hand to hand, often granted to nobles as a lordship. In 1249, Emperor Frederick II ordered the expulsion of the last Muslims from the island. Life revolved around the medieval capital, Mdina, seat of the local nobility and of a council, the Università, which represented the islanders before their successive rulers.
It was a hard time: water shortages, constant raids by Barbary corsairs who carried Maltese people off as slaves, and a subsistence economy. When the Crown of Aragon and later that of Spain inherited the Sicilian throne, Malta became a distant possession of the Habsburgs. That peripheral status was about to change all at once.
In 1530, Emperor Charles V, as King of Sicily, granted Malta, Gozo and the North African port of Tripoli to the Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, the Hospitallers, who had been left homeless after the Ottomans drove them out of Rhodes in 1522. The price of the fief was symbolic and famous: a single Maltese falcon handed over each year to the Viceroy of Sicily. That is the origin of the legend that Dashiell Hammett turned into a novel and Hollywood into a film.
The Order was an aristocratic military and religious institution, divided into 'langues' according to where its knights came from (Provence, Auvergne, France, Italy, Aragon, Castile, Germany, England). At first they looked down on Malta: an arid rock with no forests or rivers, far from their possessions. But they soon understood its strategic value and fortified the harbours. They set up their first base in Birgu (Vittoriosa), beside the Grand Harbour.
The knights ruled Malta for 268 years and transformed it completely: they built fortified cities, hospitals that were among the best in Europe, a fleet that fought corsairs and Ottomans, and a capital that still defines the country's image today. Under their rule, Malta went from a forgotten corner to a bastion of Christendom on the front line of the Mediterranean.
On 18 May 1565, a huge Ottoman fleet sent by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (some 200 ships and between 30,000 and 40,000 men) landed in Malta with orders to wipe out the Order of St John and turn the island into a base for attacking southern Europe. Facing them, Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette had barely 500 knights, a few thousand Spanish and Italian soldiers and several thousand Maltese militiamen: between 6,000 and 9,000 defenders, outnumbered at least four to one.
The siege lasted almost four months and was extremely brutal. The Ottomans concentrated their attack on Fort St Elmo, which held out for more than a month before falling, buying the defenders precious time. When they finally took it, they beheaded the defenders and threw their bodies into the sea; La Valette responded by firing the heads of Turkish prisoners from his cannons. The fight for Birgu and Senglea was waged house by house, in the summer heat, with water and ammunition running out.
On 8 September 1565 the 'Great Relief', a Spanish-led reinforcement force, finally arrived from Sicily, and the Ottomans, decimated by casualties and disease, lifted the siege and withdrew. The exact death toll is disputed, but it is estimated that around a third of the islands' inhabitants and most of the defenders perished; Ottoman losses were even higher. The victory resonated across Europe: Malta was hailed as the shield of Christendom, and La Valette as its hero.
The Great Siege left a clear lesson: the Sciberras peninsula, which overlooks the Grand Harbour, had to be fortified properly. With the prestige of victory and money pouring in from all over Europe, La Valette drove the construction of a new city, planned from scratch on Renaissance town-planning principles, with a regular grid and monumental walls. The first stone was laid on 28 March 1566. The city would bear his name: Valletta.
Over the next two centuries, the Order turned Malta into a showcase of Baroque art and architecture. St John's Co-Cathedral, plain on the outside and dazzling inside, holds the marble floor with the knights' tombs and two masterpieces by Caravaggio, who lived in Malta and was made a knight before fleeing after a brawl. The Sacra Infermeria cared for the sick of every background with a standard of care unusual for the time.
By the 18th century, however, the Order was in decline. Having lost its original military role against a retreating Ottoman Empire, it became a wealthy but idle institution, increasingly resented by the Maltese population, who paid taxes and saw the knights as a foreign caste. The French Revolution, by confiscating the Order's properties in France, also left it on the brink of bankruptcy. The knights' regime was ripe for collapse.
In June 1798, on his way to the Egyptian campaign, Napoleon Bonaparte appeared off Malta with the French fleet and demanded entry to the harbour. Grand Master Ferdinand von Hompesch surrendered almost without resistance, and the Order of St John lost Malta for good after 268 years. Napoleon spent barely six days on the island, but he decreed a whirlwind of reforms: he abolished slavery, the nobility and the Inquisition, and reorganised the administration and education.
The enthusiasm did not last. The French looted churches and convents to pay for the war, and that attack on religion inflamed a deeply Catholic population. In September 1798 the Maltese rose up and besieged the French garrison inside Valletta. Unable to drive them out alone, they asked Britain and Naples for help. The Royal Navy blockaded the island, and in September 1800, after two years of siege and hunger, the French surrendered.
Malta then came under British protection. The Maltese, who had at first seen themselves as free allies choosing their new protector, discovered that Britain had no intention of letting go of such a valuable position. The 1802 Treaty of Amiens provided for returning the island to the Order, but it was never carried out. The 1814 Treaty of Paris settled the matter: Malta officially became a colony of the British Empire.
As a colony, Malta was valued above all for its Grand Harbour, one of the finest natural anchorages in the Mediterranean. It became the main base of the British Mediterranean Fleet, a coaling station and, after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, a key stop on the imperial route to India. The Maltese economy was tied to the dockyards and the Royal Navy: when the fleet was in, there was work; when it left, there was hunger.
The British modernised the infrastructure (docks, a railway, aqueducts, hospitals) but ruled with a firm hand and granted self-government only in small doses. For decades Maltese politics revolved around the 'language question': Italian was the language of the educated elite, the Church and the courts; English, that of colonial power; and Maltese, that of ordinary people. London promoted English and Maltese at the expense of Italian, partly to weaken the cultural, and later political, influence of Fascist Italy.
In 1919, a protest over the price of bread and demands for self-government ended with British troops firing on the crowd: four Maltese were killed in what became known as the Sette Giugno (7 June) riots, a date that is now a national holiday. The pressure paid off in part: in 1921 Malta obtained a constitution with limited self-government, although London would suspend it several times in the following decades.
In the Second World War, Malta's position, halfway between Italy and North Africa, made it a decisive piece and the target of almost unprecedented punishment from the air. From 1940, when Italy entered the war, and even more fiercely once the German Luftwaffe joined in, Axis aircraft bombed the island systematically to neutralise it and clear the way for supplies to Rommel's army in Africa.
The bombing was brutal: in April 1942 alone, Malta received a greater tonnage of bombs than London did during the entire Blitz. Civilians took shelter in tunnels dug into the rock; food, fuel and ammunition ran short. The 'Operation Pedestal' convoy, in August 1942, broke the blockade at enormous cost and brought the oil that kept the island in the war. In return Malta, from where submarines and aircraft operated, sank a large share of Axis supplies and helped bring about the German defeat in North Africa.
On 15 April 1942, King George VI awarded the George Cross (Britain's highest civilian award for gallantry) not to an individual but to the whole population of Malta, 'to bear witness to a heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history'. The cross has appeared on the national flag ever since. It is probably the only case of an award of that rank being given to an entire people.
Once the war was over, with the island in ruins and a strong awareness of what Malta had contributed and suffered, the demand for full self-government became irresistible. In the early 1950s there was even a serious debate about integrating Malta directly into the United Kingdom, with MPs at Westminster; the plan foundered on tensions with the Church and British misgivings. In the end, the path to independence prevailed.
On 21 September 1964, after the British Parliament passed the Malta Independence Act and a new constitution was approved, the State of Malta was born as an independent constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth, with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. Ten years later, on 13 December 1974, Malta declared itself a republic, with a Maltese president at its head. In 1979, when the last British military base closed, almost two centuries of armed foreign presence came to a definitive end, a milestone celebrated as Jum il-Ħelsien (Freedom Day).
Politics in the following decades was shaped by the struggle between Dom Mintoff's Labour Party, which imposed strict neutrality, some closeness to non-aligned and Arab countries and a fierce clash with the Church, and the more pro-European, pro-Western Nationalist Party. The rivalry between the two, intense and at times violent, still shapes Maltese political life today.
The Nationalist Party's pro-European project was crowned on 1 May 2004, when Malta joined the European Union along with nine other countries, after a narrow referendum and an election that served as a second vote on the issue. On 1 January 2008 it adopted the euro, leaving the Maltese lira behind. With that, the EU's smallest country became fully integrated into the bloc, with Maltese recognised as an official language of the Union.
The economy was transformed: from the old model dependent on the dockyards and the naval base, Malta came to rely on tourism, financial services, online gaming and, more recently, technology. Living standards rose quickly. But the model also had a darker side: the sale of 'golden passports' (citizenship in exchange for investment) drew criticism from the European Commission, and complaints about financial opacity persist.
The darkest episode of recent times was the murder, on 16 October 2017, of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was investigating corruption in the circles of power. The crime, carried out with a car bomb, triggered a political crisis that, after mass protests, ended up forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat in early 2020. The case put Malta under the European spotlight over the rule of law. Today the country, with just under half a million inhabitants, is still negotiating its identity: deeply Catholic and yet one of the first in southern Europe to approve same-sex marriage; tiny, but with a history that weighs as much as a continent's.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Gozo, the second island of the archipelago, has always had an identity of its own next to mainland Malta: greener, more rural, more unhurried. The ancients identified it with Ogygia, the mythical island where, according to the 'Odyssey', the nymph Calypso held Odysseus for seven years; a cave above Ramla Bay still bears her name. The island's current name, Gozo (Għawdex in Maltese), has roots going back to the Punic and Arab periods.
Its history runs parallel to Malta's, but with a more vulnerable streak: being smaller and less well defended, Gozo suffered especially harshly from corsair raids. The most traumatic episode came in 1551, when an Ottoman fleet led by Dragut attacked the island and enslaved almost its entire population (several thousand people), leaving it virtually empty. Gozo had to be resettled over the following decades.
Gozo is home to the monument where this whole story starts: the Ġgantija temple complex in Xagħra, built around 3600 BC. These are the oldest megalithic structures in Malta and among the oldest in the world, older than Stonehenge and the pyramids. Its two temples, enclosed by a shared wall, were built from limestone blocks weighing up to fifty tonnes and standing more than five metres tall.
The name Ġgantija means 'of the giants': local Gozitan tradition couldn't imagine human beings moving such stones without help from giants. Listed by UNESCO in 1980 (and extended in 1992 as part of the Megalithic Temples of Malta), Ġgantija is proof that, five and a half thousand years ago, this small island already had a society capable of organising monumental construction. It is, quite literally, one of the places where architecture was born.
Gozo's capital is Victoria, which Gozitans still call Rabat. The British government gave it its official name in 1897, in honour of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Above the town rises the Ċittadella (Citadel), a walled enclosure on a hill that for centuries was the island's only safe refuge.
The Citadel played a dramatic role: until 1637, a law required Gozo's entire population to spend the night inside its walls for protection against corsair attacks. When Dragut devastated the island in 1551, it was precisely after breaching the Citadel's defences that he carried off its inhabitants as captives. Today, restored, it offers a 360-degree view over Gozo's fields and villages and holds the cathedral, the old courthouse and the prisons, a whole summary of the island's history on a single hilltop.
Between Malta and Gozo lies Comino, a tiny islet of just over three square kilometres, now almost uninhabited. Its name comes from cumin, the spice that once grew wild on the island. Throughout history it was a place of passage and of danger: a hideout for corsairs and pirates lying in wait in the channel between the two larger islands, and for that very reason something to keep watch over.
To control it, Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt had Saint Mary's Tower built in 1618, a sturdy watchtower that still dominates the island and served as a visual link between Malta and Gozo. Under the Order's rule, Comino was also used as a hunting ground and, at one point, as a place of exile for knights who had been punished. Its isolation, once a problem, is now its greatest appeal.
Comino's most famous spot is the Blue Lagoon, an inlet of clear turquoise water between the islet and the rock of Cominotto, one of the most photographed seascapes in the Mediterranean. Much of Comino is protected as a nature reserve and bird sanctuary, a contrast with the urban density of the main island.
This pair of islands, Gozo and Comino, preserves the Malta most closely tied to nature and to the traditional farming and fishing cycle. Gozo held on longer to the 'purest' Maltese, to rural customs and to an intense religious life, with its big village feasts. In contrast to the cosmopolitan Malta of the harbours, an older rhythm survives here: that of an island community that for centuries looked at the sea as both threat and livelihood, and today shows it to the world as its greatest treasure.
Until the 19th century, the shoreline Sliema occupies today was little more than a fishing and bathing spot across from Valletta; its name comes from an old chapel dedicated to the Virgin ('Sliem għalik, Marija', the greeting of the Hail Mary in Maltese). During the boom of the British period, well-off Valletta families began building summer houses here to escape the heat and bustle of the capital.
Over time, Sliema became the modern face of Malta: a seafront promenade, shops, cafés and apartment towers that look across Marsamxett Harbour at the walls of Valletta. It is the perfect counterpoint to the historic capital: where one holds five centuries of stone, the other shows contemporary Malta, prosperous and turned towards the Mediterranean.
Sliema's neighbour, St Julian's (San Ġiljan), also began as a fishing village around a bay and a 17th-century church. Its Spinola Bay, with the knights' old palace of the same name, keeps the feel of the old fishing harbour. But what made St Julian's famous in recent decades was Paceville, the district packed with nightlife, hotels and casinos, the epicentre of the island's party scene.
This area sums up Malta's economic shift after independence: from a model dependent on the naval base to one built on mass tourism and services. The growth was dizzying and not without tension, with intensive development that completely changed the profile of the coast. Here you can see, in concrete and lights, the Malta that in a few decades went from impoverished colony to European services economy.
In the south-east of the island, Marsaxlokk is Malta's great fishing village, and its name says it all: from the Arabic 'marsa' (harbour) and 'xlokk' (the south-easterly sirocco wind). Its bay fills with luzzu, the traditional boats painted in bright colours, with an Eye of Osiris or Horus painted on the bow — a legacy that goes back to the Phoenicians — to protect the fisherman from evil.
Marsaxlokk's history has one major chapter: it was in this bay, in December 1989, that the Malta Summit took place between US President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the meeting often pointed to as the symbolic end of the Cold War. That this historic moment happened off a fishing village sums up Malta's fate well: a small place where, because of its position, the world's great currents cross.
For centuries, Malta's shoreline was the line of contact — and of danger — with the outside world. The bays that are now beach resorts were the places where corsairs, invaders or enemy fleets could land. That is why the knights dotted the whole coast with watchtowers: the Wignacourt, De Redin and Lascaris towers, named after the grand masters who had them built in the 17th and 18th centuries, formed a chain that could raise the alarm with bonfires from one end of the island to the other.
That defensive role now sits alongside tourism. The same bays that were fortified against the sirocco and the corsair are now the country's seaside shop window. Travelling this coast means reading, in towers and promenades, Malta's double nature: an island that lived looking at the sea in fear and that today lives, above all, from welcoming those who arrive by it in peace.
If the interior is the Malta of the land, this coast is the Malta of the sea and of daily trade. The Sunday fish market in Marsaxlokk, where the early-morning catch is sold beside the bay, is a living tradition that connects with millennia of fishing history. The Maltese diet — seasonal lampuki (dorado), octopus, rabbit stew — grew out of that close relationship with the sea and with scarce land.
This coastal strip is now home to much of Malta's population and economy. It was the first to modernise under the British, the first to open up to tourism and the one that changed fastest after joining the European Union. In its markets, promenades and bays you can feel the real pulse of the country: one of the most densely populated in the world, where the fishing past and the European present sit just a few metres apart.
Long before Valletta, Malta's capital lay inland, on top of a defensible hill: Mdina. The site was inhabited from the Bronze Age and the Phoenicians walled it. The Romans made it their main town, Melita, which also took in today's Rabat. Its current name, however, is Arabic: 'medina' means city, and it was under Muslim rule, in the 11th century, that its perimeter was shrunk to the fortified hill and it took the shape it keeps today.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Mdina was the seat of the Maltese nobility and of the local council, the Università. When the knights arrived in 1530 and moved power to the harbours, Mdina remained a stronghold of the rural aristocracy, resentful at having lost its prominence. It is known as the 'Silent City' because hardly any cars drive inside its walls and the bustle of the rest of the island suddenly fades away.
Right next to Mdina, outside its walls, lies Rabat — whose Arabic name means precisely 'suburb', the outskirts of the city. This is where Malta's oldest Christian memory is kept. Tradition holds that the apostle Paul, after being shipwrecked around AD 60, lived in a grotto beneath today's St Paul's Church during his three-month stay.
Beneath Rabat stretches a maze of early Christian catacombs — St Paul's and St Agatha's — dug between the 3rd and 5th centuries, with tombs of Christian, Jewish and pagan families, proof of a diverse and very early community. The Domus Romana also survives, a Roman townhouse with remarkable mosaics discovered in the 19th century. Rabat is, in a sense, Malta's historical underground: beneath its quiet streets lies the island's Antiquity.
On the southern edge of this region, on a cliff looking out to the islet of Filfla, stands Ħaġar Qim, one of Malta's most impressive megalithic temples. Its main building went up between 3600 and 3200 BC, right in the Temple Period, and it is striking for the size of its blocks: one of them is almost seven metres long and weighs around twenty tonnes.
Ħaġar Qim and its neighbour Mnajdra, now joined under a large protective canopy, show how sophisticated that Neolithic culture was: alignments with the sun at the solstices and equinoxes, carved altars, statuettes of corpulent figures linked to fertility. That people without metal or the wheel raised these sanctuaries on bare rock, looking out over the Mediterranean, remains one of the great puzzles of European prehistory.
West of the historic centre, Malta's plateau drops away abruptly at the Dingli Cliffs, which rise some 250 metres above the sea and mark the highest point in the country. There are no great monuments here, but there is a way of reading the landscape that explains Maltese history: from these heights people watched for approaching ships, and the small chapel of St Mary Magdalene recalls the religious and strategic use of the place.
The west coast, steep and without harbours, was always Malta's 'back': while invaders and empires fought over the eastern harbours, this slope remained an agricultural frontier, with terraced fields clinging to the stone and the mysterious 'cart ruts', parallel grooves cut into the rock by prehistoric traffic whose exact purpose is still debated. It is the country's rural, austere side, the one that survived by working difficult ground.
This inland region stands for the Malta that doesn't face the harbour: the Malta of farming villages, the noble families of Mdina and a life tied to the land rather than the sea. While the coast lived off the Navy and trade, here people grew wheat, vines and cotton, and held on to a more conservative, traditional identity.
It was also a refuge in times of danger. For centuries, when Barbary corsairs raided the coasts, people sought shelter inland, out of reach of the landings. Mdina, with its walls, was the last line of defence for the interior. That contrast — the walled, silent interior versus the noisy, cosmopolitan harbour — still defines two different ways of being Maltese today.
Valletta would not exist without the Great Siege of 1565. The rocky peninsula of Mount Sciberras, between Malta's two natural harbours, had been the spot the Ottomans used during the siege to bombard the knights. The lesson stuck: whoever controlled that tongue of land controlled the Grand Harbour. On 28 March 1566, barely six months after the victory, Grand Master Jean de la Valette laid the first stone of a new city that would bear his name.
Valletta was one of the first planned cities in Europe built on the principles of Renaissance town planning: a regular grid laid out over the rock, designed for drainage, ventilation and, above all, defence. The military engineer Francesco Laparelli, sent by the Pope, designed the colossal walls; his Maltese assistant, Girolamo Cassar, oversaw many of the buildings. La Valette never saw it finished: he died in 1568 and is buried in the city he founded.
The monument that sums up the Order's power is St John's Co-Cathedral, completed in 1577. Its façade is plain, almost military; the interior is a Baroque explosion of gold, marble and painting. The floor is covered by some 400 inlaid marble tombstones beneath which the most illustrious knights rest, each with its coat of arms and motto.
In the oratory hangs the only work Caravaggio ever signed: 'The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist' (1608), his largest canvas and a high point of Western painting. The Lombard painter had fled Rome accused of murder and was admitted as a knight in Malta, but he soon got caught up in another violent brawl, was jailed, escaped and ended up expelled from the Order 'as a foul and rotten member'. His brief, turbulent stay left Malta two masterpieces.
Before Valletta, the Order's centre was on the opposite shore of the Grand Harbour, in the so-called Three Cities: Birgu, Senglea and Cospicua. Birgu was the knights' first base when they arrived in 1530, and there they built Fort St Angelo, La Valette's command post during the Great Siege. For their role in the resistance of 1565, Birgu was given the title Città Vittoriosa (Vittoriosa) and Senglea that of Città Invicta.
Older and humbler than the capital, these towns preserve the medieval street plan, the shipyards and Malta's naval memory. During the British period, the Grand Harbour they surround was the heart of the Royal Navy base, and for that very reason a prime target for Axis bombing in the Second World War, which left them badly damaged. Today they keep the feel of a historic port, with the Vittoriosa marina at the foot of the walls.
Everything in this region revolves around the Grand Harbour, the deep natural anchorage that explains why so many empires wanted Malta. Phoenicians, Romans, knights and British all used it as a naval base; its geography of creeks and peninsulas made it possible to shelter and defend entire fleets. Under British rule it filled up with dry docks, wharves and shipyards that employed generations of Maltese.
That dependence had its bitter side: whenever the Royal Navy scaled down its presence, unemployment hit harbour families hard. The gradual closure of the base after independence, completed in 1979, forced the economy to reinvent itself. Today the Grand Harbour mixes cruise traffic, yachting and heritage, but it is still the place where you can read, at a glance, the country's military and maritime history.
In 1980, UNESCO inscribed the City of Valletta as a World Heritage Site, describing it as one of the most concentrated historic areas in the world: 320 monuments in just 55 hectares. Palaces of the Order, auberges (the residences of each 'langue' of knights), churches, gardens overlooking the harbour and the Grand Master's Palace, today the seat of the Presidency and for a long time home to Parliament.
In 2018, Valletta was European Capital of Culture, a distinction that drove the restoration of buildings and the opening of spaces such as the City Gate and the Parliament building designed by Renzo Piano. The small capital — one of the smallest in Europe, with only a few thousand residents — thus packs five centuries of Maltese history into a handful of streets you can explore on foot in an afternoon.
Hardly anything that happened to Malta happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
