I don’t care for the line that emerges sometimes when people visit places that have been around for a while: “it felt like walking back in time”. That’s hard to do. For starters, take the cars off the streets and the smartphones out of everyone’s hands and replace everyone’s assembly-line clothing with something less comfortable and transform the litter into animal droppings. Then walk back all the lives of the people there a few generations, nullify all the transactions that caused the buildings to change hands (and maybe the laws that governed them too), and change the composition of the air to contain the gases that would be produced from 1Xth-century economic production instead of today’s.
You can’t. It’s impossible. We can approximate what we think a place might be like, but it’s always selective; if we put the open sewers back into the equation, our memories would be much less fond.
That’s not to say that comparisons across time (or space) are completely useless. Some places are trying to accentuate their history, and some are trying to feel hyper-modern. Some are trying to feel like somewhere else entirely, and some have had somewhere else superimposed on top and then removed, like a weathering layer of paint.
I arrived in Valletta, the capital of Malta, already feeling a sense of being in the wrong country. It wasn’t the people, who aggressively remind you of their Maltese-ness, which for them also means European-ness and Catholic-ness. Actually, it was the van. To fit our visitors, my grandparents decided to rent a larger vehicle from a local company. What they got was beyond ridiculous: a 1992 Suzuki Carry microvan with a 78-horsepower four-cylinder engine, graying vinyl seats, and woefully inadequate air conditioning. It was like I walked into a bizarro-anime episode of The Magic School Bus about the Knights Hospitaller. I don’t think you could rent a worse car.
That’s not why I felt like Valletta should be somewhere else. Its buildings are clearly Mediterranean, but the signs for businesses housed within all have English signs, to the point of ridiculousness: how many “haberdasheries” exist on your typical British high street? It’s as if the locals were fearful they might never have business again once the economic engine of the British naval base left, so they took their pasta and drowned it in HP sauce. The ones that don’t are distinctly unidentifiable: who is “Xmun Borg”, and is he an alien, or just a lost Scandinavian? Outside of the main shopping street, much of the cityscape has lost both its luster and its pedestrians, like a spinal column with no ribcage. Yet not a mile away there is a gleaming new parliament building, limestone drizzled in glass. Judging by the traffic on the way in, there are clearly no shortage of people to be governed (and ticketed for reckless driving), but parts of Valletta feel like they’re painted to attract people who no longer exist. It’s Europe’s tiniest capital, but it does feel like it should have a population much larger than the 6400-odd folk that actually live there.
I don’t know if that makes any sense. In any case, I found the decaying mod-era storefronts of Valletta weirdly neat, and took some pictures. Enjoy them below:
