After several pandemic years, I now find myself in a different country. Leaving the UK after such a long period felt not a little intimidating, as well as freeing. After negotiating the (sensible-but-tricksy) bureaucratic complexities of international travel, I made it to Malta with the family.
Going on a holiday for me is about all the usual stuff - relaxing, exploring, getting a break from work, reconnecting with the world, discovering new cultures - and it’s also a chance to recharge creative batteries and find new inspiration. I’ve written before about how visiting Ronda in Spain was a major influence on The Mehcanical Crown:
My hope was that a week in Malta would be similarly inspirational, either for the on-going writing of Tales from the Triverse or future projects.
I missed Monday’s regular newsletter but for good reason - I wanted to look back at some of what I’ve seen this week.
Combine architecture
So, turns out someone in Valletta really liked Half Life 2.
That is a lift embedded in the side of a rocky gorge to get people up and down. It’s designed to look like it sliced into the rock itself. I couldn’t help but think of City 17 from the Half Life games, with its alien structures grafted onto an eastern European cityscape. Malta’s architecture is very different to that of eastern Europe, of course, but the Combine replica is spot on.
Triverse is all about cultural and dimensional mash-ups, so this is a good reminder for me of how contrast can be a hugely effective storytelling technique.
Religion has a lot of money
One thing you can say for religion is that it tends to get by OK financially. That’s how they end up with buildings that look like this:
The word opulent is woefully inadequate. This is St John’s Co-Cathedral, right in the middle of Valletta and a quite astonishing artistic and technical achievement. Every possible surface is covered with an impressive piece of art, to the point that it makes your eyes start to hurt.
Of particular interest was the central dais and organ area, with the red carpet seen above. It would make for a brilliant throne room for an especially proud king, which I may have to repurpose once the Triverse story starts to properly explore Palinor.
Cannons, cannons everywhere
Ther eare an awful lot of cannons in Malta. I mean, they really love cannons.
They have to check the barrel of the cannons every day before firing, by looking from the back to the front. This used to be a part of loading procedure, just in case the enemy had sabotaged it by blocking the exit. These days it’s to make sure a pigeon or cat hasn’t decided to have a snooze inside.
What this place really emphasised is Malta’s history of conflict, and how one side of the harbour has periodically been fighting the other side of the harbour, something which seems quite bizarre given their proximity. Apparently the Ottomans once sent the heads of prisoners floating across the bay; the Maltese opposition holed up in the fort opposite returned the favour by firing heads of their prisoners out of cannons.
See? They like cannons.
Tall and narrow streets
Valletta is a tall and narrow city. From any position you can see a long way down the street, often to the sea glimpsed in a narrow framing at the end. Buildings are consistently three-to-four storeys tall, keeping the streets shaded from the summer sun. Seeing modern cars attempting to navigate the place is hilarious, but on foot it’s glorious.
Especially pleasing is the way the sun glints off the burnt yellow limestone, reliably blue skies overhead. As far as I could tell, it’s always magic hour in Malta.
Everything is big
All the old stuff in Malta is huge. It’s a country and an island that seems to have inspired poeple to think big and be ambitious, for literally thousands of years.
This is a bridge that serves as a key entryway to the older part of Valletta. Looks at the scale of the thing! The scale of everything is emphasised through the use of solid stone. There’s very little metal or wooden construction, presumably due to Malta a) having very few trees and b) Malta apparently having very little metal ore. It gives the coutnry’s architecture a unique and beautiful signature, reminding me oddly of Soviet and 1960s Southbank Centre brutalism, but softened by the use of a warm-coloured stone instead of concrete.
Living in Norwich, it’s sometimes difficult to visualise fictional places which are supposed to be highly vertical and epic in scale; visiting Malta has certainly assisted with that.
The water is blue
You know how kids draw water as being blue, even though it more often tends to be a sort of murky grey? At least, in northern Europe. Well, in Malta it looks like this:
#nofilters. In fact, no colour correction whatsoever, and the vivid blue here is if anything lesser than it looked to the naked eye. Drifting your hand through the waters of the Blue Grotto gives the impression of your skin actively glowing. It’s quite remarkable.
It’s something to do with combination of sky, sun, sand and cave roof. Astonishing.
Malta is really, really old
There is so much history on this island, squeezed into a tiny geographicaly space. It feels as rich and complex as the United Kingdom, despite the capital city being technically smaller than Norwich.
It’s actually quite hard to wrap one’s head around the scope of Maltese history. I mean:
Those rocks? An ancient settlement. As in, 5,600 years old. That is older than Stonehenge. The megalithic temples of Malta are mind-boggling in their complexity and technical achievement. The artistic artefacts recovered from these sites are also remarkably modern in their depictions of humans.
In fact, it feels like the people living on Gozo 5,600 years ago were way ahead of the game in all sorts of ways. They vanished at some point, which I can’t help but feel was a missed opportunity for humans to jump ahead a few hundred years.
Also, megalith is a fantastic word.
I’ve only been here a week, but I have endless stories to tell. A lot of them will end up being translated into Tales from the Triverse.
This was great! I love how travel inspires story ideas. Reminds me of when I was in Santorini and the hotel left a little postcard on the nightstand about the island's pirate encounters.