Republic Street & the Auberge de Provence

The grid was radical in 1566, when most European cities were medieval tangles, and two practical arguments settled it. Troops move fast down a straight line, and a street on this alignment draws the sea wind along its length through the summer. Every cross street meets it at a right angle.

Its name has followed whoever held the island. Strada San Giorgio under the Order, then Strada Reale; Kingsway once the British were in charge; and Republic Street from the declaration of the republic in 1974. Four names on one kilometre of pavement is not a bad summary of Maltese history.

The langue of Provence built it in the 1570s. France had three langues of its own in the Order — Provence, France and Auvergne, each with its own house — and this is the one that came through the twentieth century, where several other auberges were flattened by bombing in 1942.

Upstairs, the Grand Salon has been restored to something close to how the knights knew it. This is where the Provençal langue ate together at long tables, in silence, while a reading was given.

Malta has the oldest free-standing stone monuments in the world: temple complexes begun around 3600 BC, more than a thousand years before the pyramids at Giza. The objects found in them are in this building.

Ask for the Sleeping Lady. She is a hand-sized terracotta of a woman asleep on her side on a couch, lifted from the rock-cut burial chambers of the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, and she is around five thousand years old. Nothing else in the museum is as quietly disarming.