My view from Valletta’s monumental, austere City Gate is a master class in palimpsestic architecture. Plunging below me are the 16th-century walls that snake around the city’s fortified harbor, while the rest of the scene is crowded with Corinthian columns, Art Deco friezes, and a 1950s Triton fountain, a reminder of the city’s maritime heritage. The distant hills are topped with Baroque churches and home to the ruins of prehistoric megalithic temples, dating as far back as 3600 BCE.
Like so many islands in the Mediterranean, Malta carries the mark of numerous occupying powers, including the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, French, and British, who ruled from 1813 until 1964. In 1980, UNESCO named the country’s tiny capital a World Heritage Site, describing it as “one of the most concentrated historic areas in the world” with some 320 monuments crammed into 136 acres. But in contrast to the chaos of many nearby Mediterranean port cities, there’s a quiet order here: the legacy of the Knights Templar, who occupied and reinforced the city and much of the island in 1530 in the aftermath of the Crusades.
Yet even with all these layers of history, the City Gate itself is evidence of Malta’s commitment to the future. The fifth such structure to stand on the site is the product of a broader project, completed in 2014 by Italian firm Renzo Piano Building Workshop, to reconstruct the gate and rethink the area around it. The firm pared down architectural elements added over the centuries and reinstated the drama of the city’s original medieval stone ramparts. The undertaking brought clarity to the old city and opened the door for the development that has followed in the decade since.
“Valletta is ancient, but it’s very open to new ideas,” says Guillaume Dreyfuss, manager of exhibitions at Malta International Contemporary Arts Space (MICAS), which opened last year with a mission to bolster Malta’s cultural infrastructure and increase its role in the contemporary art world. Located a 10-minute walk from the City Gate, the building is a testament to Valletta’s knack for situating the present within its rich past. It occupies an 18th-century hospice—a concept established in Malta nearly a millennium ago to care for the tired, sick, and dying who passed through on pilgrimages to and from the Holy Land. The Florence-based architecture firm Ipostudio gutted the space and created a Chutes and Ladders–style gallery experience full of modern sky bridges and restored tunnels and secret staircases. A giant knit tree by Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos climbs into a skylighted rotunda, a bluestone figurative sculpture by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone sits in the landscaped garden, and the warren of darkened chambers below feature mesmerizing kinetic light sculptures by the British artist Conrad Shawcross. MICAS highlights work from the island as well, Dreyfuss hastens to add as we walk past a metal-and-rod sculpture by the celebrated local artist Raymond Pitrè.
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While Malta was for centuries a pawn in the chess match of European civilizations, its soul is deeply Mediterranean, as a constellation of new restaurants is reminding diners. Long unsung local ingredients are finding their way onto menus. At Ion Harbour, dishes like rossi prawn and sea jelly with a whey-and-smoked-pike-roe sauce helped it become the first two-starred Michelin restaurant on the island last year; the wine list includes offerings made from such indigenous grape varieties as Ġellewża and Girgentina. The year-old Le GV at the 1926 Le Soleil hotel plates up creative dishes like amberjack and sea urchin with local pink-grapefruit zabaglione.
Unlike nearly every other island in the Med, Malta is a sovereign nation, which gives it unique power to fast-track development. The year 2024 saw the birth of the new KM Malta Airline, while the ferry terminal in the town of Sliema underwent a massive transformation, and Valletta Cruise Port terminal launched new services to Sicily and other ports within the Malta archipelago, including Comino, where a Six Senses hotel is slated to open in 2027. Malta is also implementing some of the region’s strictest environmental guidelines for tourism, phasing out gas-powered cars by 2030 and introducing electric charging stations for cruise ships, which will reduce emissions by 90%.