We have continued to explore old Valletta. On Thursday, on the way home from the Gozo ferry, we walked through the old warehouse area. Very photogenic:








Yesterday, Friday, was the day of the Big Storm... We were expecting it. It started, on schedule, during the night. And it carried on blowing (and intermittently raining) until the early afternoon. All the ferries were knocked out. Not just the ones to Gozo and across the harbour, but the ferry to Sicily, too.

And our Malta imp is still with us. Even though our little courtyard is surrounded by high walls, and therefore incredibly sheltered, the winds had managed to bring down two planters. So we reinstated the poor shocked cacti in their rightful beds, and as soon as the ground was dry, swept up a ton of soil and broken bits of leaf.

But we did manage a quick walk between storm-end and sun-down:












We visited Senglea, one of the Knights' "three cities", on Tuesday. Today we caught the bus over that way again, and walked the streets of Birgu and Cospicua.





















So that's all been Birgu. The last of the three cities is Cospicua, which occupies the web, as it were, between the two fingers of Senglea and Birgu. Again, you have to stop yourself taking photos, because you could click away all day, and still find cool images:






I'll close with the statue of Pietro Paolo Floriani, just up the road from where we've been living. The Floriana area (named after him) celebrated its 300th birthday last year, and it's an interesting story. Valletta, as that article puts it, was designed to be a war machine. But the bastions and fortresses of the inner city began to seem insufficient. What if the enemy penetrated the city on foot, from the landward end of the peninsula? So military engineer Floriani was commissioned to fix the problem. He arrived in 1634, and designed the Floriana Lines, effectively another line of bastions flanking the existing ones. Unacceptable, cried the great ones. Decades later, however, his plans were executed. Next problem: Valletta is overcrowded. It was decided that residential building would be allowed in the glacis (the space between the two walls), but only under certain conditions: "Houses had to be a maximum of one storey high and could be disassembled easily should there be the need for it during a siege; streets had to be grid-shaped so that the enemy couldn’t hide; and, most importantly, the glacis had to remain, but on a smaller scale. No buildings were, in fact, allowed in the last stretch of land leading into Valletta." And that was the decision made in 1724...