Cities of Sand

William Shunn from Astoria, Queens, in the USA, says Valletta's street plan is reminiscent of Manhattan's but on a smaller scale, from Cities of Sand:

A nine-hour flight east, a four-hour layover in Rome, and a one-hour flight due south brought us early yesterday afternoon to the tiny Mediterranean island nation of Malta. The weather here is a vast improvement over Chicago's. It's sunny, with a bit of haze in the evenings, and just the cool side of warm. North across the water lies Sicily. To the south is Libya. To the west is Tunisia. This island, in fact, lies farther south than Tunis.

Malta belongs to the EU, so passport control was ridiculously easy. In fact, since our visas were stamped in Rome, we didn't have to fuss with customs at all. A harrowing ten-minute cab ride, wilder than any Manhattan trip, brought us to our hotel, but we were distracted from imminent death by the gorgeous vistas of sand-colored buildings crowding every hillside in sight, occasionally topped by spectacular towers and domes. It's probably fortunate that we didn't learn until we reached our hotel room that Malta's rate of traffic accidents is the highest in the EU.

Our hotel is in St. Julian's, a metropolitan resort sort of city on the north shore. We're next door to a multiplex movie theater and across from a bowling alley. Our hotel has a private beach. But slumming on the sand was not our goal yesterday. Once we were settled and changed, we hopped a bus back east a few miles to Malta's capital, the medieval city of Valletta...It occupies a long narrow promontory pointing northeast between Marsamxett Harbour on the northwest and Grand Harbour on the southeast, with a street plan very reminiscent of Manhattan's (on a rather smaller scale)...Some of the streets are quite steep, with steps built in. Many corners have a large statue of a saint, a knight, or the Virgin set into an alcove a story above street level.

The views from either side of the island are spectacular, especially across Grand Harbour to the Three Cities, built on three promontories jutting northwest into the harbor. Fort St. Angelo, pivotal for the Knights during the brutal siege by the Ottomans in 1565 and then by the British Navy during World War II, makes for a particularly impressive sight on the middle promontory.