Valletta was drawn in full before it existed.

01 A city that was a drawing first

You feel it before you can explain it. Ten minutes in, something is off in a way that is hard to name: you can see too far. Look down any street and there is no bend to hide the end of it, no widening, no accidental little square. The view runs the full length of the peninsula and finishes on water. In a city of this age that is not normal, and it is not luck.

02 Five years, one plan, one office

The sequence is unusually well documented. After the siege of 1565, the Order that held Malta decided to fortify the empty Sciberras peninsula between the two harbours. The pope sent his own military architect, Francesco Laparelli, to design it; the Spanish king sent money. Laparelli drew a rectangular grid, deliberately breaking with the winding medieval pattern of Maltese towns, and — a significant decision — left out the collacchio, the walled inner enclosure reserved for the knights that older Order towns had. There would be no privileged quarter. The grid would be uniform.

He died in 1570, and his Maltese assistant Girolamo Cassar carried the work through. Construction was overseen by a body called the Ufficio delle Case, which functioned as a planning authority: what you could build, and where. The city was largely finished by the early 1570s and became the capital on 18 March 1571 — five years from first stone to seat of government. In 1980 UNESCO inscribed it, counting some 320 monuments inside an area of about 0.6 square kilometres, which is among the densest concentrations of protected fabric anywhere.

03 The grid won, so the streets are stairs

Here is where the drawing gets interesting, because the site did not cooperate. The peninsula is not flat: it is a ridge, higher along its spine and falling away to the water on both sides. A grid drawn on paper takes no account of that. Two things could have happened — the plan could bend to the ground, or the ground could be forced to accept the plan.

The plan won. The long streets run more or less along the ridge and stay walkable. The cross streets, which have to get from the spine down to the harbour on either side, simply take the slope head-on — and because the slope is too steep for a road, they become staircases. Not a flight of steps here and there: entire streets that are stairs from one end to the other, with the house doors opening onto the landings.

This is the single best thing to understand before arriving, because it changes what the city feels like to use. Half of Valletta's streets are horizontal and easy; the other half are vertical and slow. A distance of two hundred metres can be a stroll or a climb depending entirely on which way you are facing, and no map tells you which.

04 One material, and it came from below

The other reason the city reads as a single object is that it is made of one thing. Valletta is built almost entirely of globigerina limestone, the pale honey-coloured stone of the islands, which is soft enough to cut with a saw when freshly quarried and hardens on exposure to air. Walls, bastions, façades, steps, window surrounds, the carved brackets under the balconies: same stone, same colour, different ages.

It came from directly underneath. Building a fortress city on rock means cutting ditches, foundations and galleries out of that rock first, and the material you remove is exactly the material you need to build with. The city is, in a fairly literal sense, made of its own hole. That is why the fortifications do not look applied to the site and the houses do not look placed on top of it: everything is the same substance, and the line between the natural rock and the built wall is often genuinely hard to see.

05 Everything ends at the water

The peninsula is narrow, so every cross street reaches the edge within a few hundred metres, and the edge is a bastion — in places built up to some forty-seven metres high — with the sea underneath it. That produces the effect that people remember longest about Valletta without quite identifying it: you keep arriving at the end of the world by accident. You turn a corner intending to reach a square and instead the street stops at a parapet, and there is a harbour, and on the far side another fortified town looking back.

06 How to walk it

Do not plan a route. In a city this small and this regular, a route is redundant — you cannot get lost, because the grid returns you to yourself every time. What works instead is a rule: walk the long streets in one direction, and come back along a different parallel one. Do that three or four times and you will have covered the city, seen how each street ends, and understood the plan without reading anything about it.

Take the stairs deliberately at least once, ideally early or late rather than in the middle of the day. And spend some time at the two edges rather than in the middle: the bastions are where the design is visible as a whole, and where you can see what the plan was for.

What stays afterwards is the strangeness of walking through an idea. Valletta was thought all the way through before anybody lived in it, and then people lived in it for four and a half centuries and it held. Very few cities let you see a single decision — draw the grid and do not bend it — still deciding, every day, which of your streets is a walk and which is a climb.