Valletta Audioguides

Valletta was founded in 1566 by Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette, the man who had just fought off the Ottoman Empire in the Great Siege of 1565, and he built it on a peninsula with the kind of strategic confidence that comes from having barely survived. Architect Francesco Laparelli laid out a rectangular grid of streets planned for defence and drama in equal measure, and the city was mostly complete by the early 1570s. Benjamin Disraeli later called it 'a city of palaces built by gentlemen for gentlemen,' and walking through it, you understand exactly what he meant.

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55 square kilometres, Valletta contains 320 monuments, one of the most concentrated collections anywhere on earth. St John's Co-Cathedral holds Caravaggio's only signed painting, 'The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist', its scale alone stopping visitors in their tracks. Strait Street, once known as 'The Gut', is where Allied sailors came to find jazz and trouble during both World Wars; today it has bars and restaurants but still carries traces of that theatrical seediness. The Manoel Theatre has been staging performances since 1731.