City Gate & the Ditch

In 1565 an Ottoman expedition landed in Malta and besieged the Knights of St John for close to four months. The Knights held, at appalling cost, and their Grand Master, Jean Parisot de Valette, drew the obvious conclusion: surviving once was not a defence policy. Within a year he had begun an entirely new city on the empty limestone ridge between the two harbours, with the foundation stone laid on 28 March 1566.

The plan came from Francesco Laparelli, a military engineer sent by the Pope who had worked with Michelangelo in Rome; the Maltese architect Girolamo Cassar finished it after Laparelli left. What they produced was rare for the sixteenth century — a city laid out whole, on a grid, with a drainage system, straight streets angled to pull sea breeze through them, and defences designed before the houses.

The ditch below the bridge is not a valley. It was cut across the neck of the peninsula by masons, slaves and paid labourers, runs roughly a kilometre from one harbour to the other and drops around twenty metres. Its purpose was to deny an attacking army any usable ground in front of the walls.

It has since been a rubbish dump, a football pitch and a car park. It is now landscaped, open to walk into, and the best place to appreciate how much rock was removed by hand to make the city possible.

Every generation has rebuilt this entrance and disowned the last one. The current gate, completed in 2014 to a design by Renzo Piano, narrows the opening back to roughly the width of the original sixteenth-century breach and lines it with two tall steel blades, so that you feel the thickness of the wall as you pass through.

It is deliberately not ceremonial: no arch, no pediment, no triumphal decoration. Maltese opinion on it has never settled, which by now is part of the tradition.