Valletta City Gate, the Parliament and the opera house left in ruins

If you come into Valletta by bus, this is where you walk in, and it’s easy to pass straight through. That would be a shame, because the first hundred metres of the city hold three things with more to say than you’d think, a gate that’s the fifth in its history, the Parliament of an EU member state, and the ruins of an opera house destroyed in the war. All three are one Renzo Piano scheme.

Five gates in four and a half centuries

The Grand Harbour Regeneration Corporation, the government agency behind these projects, tells the gate’s story in detail. The first, Porta San Giorgio, was begun in 1566 and finished in 1569, between St James’ and St John’s Bastions, to a design by Francesco Laparelli or Girolamo Cassar. In 1586 it was enlarged, renamed Porta Reale and given a wooden drawbridge across the ditch.

In 1633 it was pulled down and replaced by a more ornate gate attributed to Tommaso Dingli. In 1853 the British swapped it for one with two large arches and two small ones for pedestrians. The fourth, by Alziro Bergonzo in the Italian Rationalist style, was started in 1964 and finished a year later. It was widely criticised, which doesn’t surprise me, since it was meant to go with a new opera house that never happened.

Piano had put forward plans for the city entrance back in the 20th century, but they stalled. The project was revised in 2008 and Bergonzo’s gate came down in 2011. The new one isn’t an arch at all but a simple, narrow cut through the wall just 8 metres wide, designed, GHRC says, to compress movement as you pass. I think it works rather well, because it makes you feel you’re genuinely entering a fortress.

Malta’s Parliament, just inside

Once through, beside Republic Street, is the new Parliament building. Malta is a single-chamber parliamentary republic, with a largely ceremonial president and a prime minister heading the government, as the EU summarises it. I cover how the state works on Malta’s political system.

The House used to sit in the Grandmaster’s Palace, where Malta’s first constitutional parliament met in 1921, back when the building was the British Governor’s residence. In 1976 it took over the hall that had been the Armoury. Once the House relocated to this new building, that hall emptied and the arms returned to it. You can see the result at the Grandmaster’s Palace in Valletta. Beneath the new Parliament, an underground library and archive opened on 11 March 2022, holding records from 1845, on the spot where the old railway used to start.

What I can’t tell you, I’m afraid, is whether Parliament can be visited inside. Its website couldn’t be consulted, and I haven’t found another official source that says so, so I’d rather leave it there than guess at opening times.

What was the Royal Opera House?

By the mid-19th century the Manoel Theatre was too small for opera audiences, and in 1860 the Governor approved a new theatre at the entrance to Valletta. It was designed by the English architect Edward Middleton Barry, whose London work included Covent Garden, and built between 1862 and 1866. It opened on 9 October 1866 with Bellini’s I Puritani, seating 1,095 with room for 200 standing, more than double the Manoel Theatre in Valletta.

A fire gutted it in 1873 and it reopened in 1877 with Aida. On the evening of Tuesday 7 April 1942 an air raid destroyed it. Only the columns and the stone base survived, and for decades the interior served as a car park.

Piano didn’t rebuild it. He left the ruins standing and set Pjazza Teatru Rjal inside them, an open-air theatre of 2,800 m² with around 900 seats, completed in August 2013. The theatre’s own website calls it a monument to the heroism, tenacity and dignity of the Maltese in the war, and I see it the same way. If your trip coincides with a performance, watching one among those columns is, to my mind, one of the best evenings Valletta can offer, and the wider story of those years is on Malta in the Second World War.