My
Rough Guide called Floriana "a quiet little town that feels like a suburb of Valletta" and that was pretty much what it was. Monuments to dead airmen and independence, a Roman square with stone columns spaced about like stumps in a forest clearing, a cat-feeding station, a boarded up church with
Sex room? scrawled on what used to be the window, a look-out point over a white and beige jumble of houses and church domes and factory chimneys as if someone had managed to squeeze a provincial Italian city together with a Lancashire milltown and the outskirts of Fez.
I passed back through the bus station and into a square straight out of a Disneyland Mediterranean village. Porticoed arcades, painted wooden balconies, a Burger King and a craft shop with
Clearance Sale, Factory Prices Inside pasted on the window. There were children playing hide and seek behind the tomb in Hastings Gardens and a five-a-side pitch built into the battlements. I walked down Republic Street, the spine of the city. Past St John's Co-Cathedral the sights came thick and fast: the National Library, Manoel Theatre, the Grand Master's Palace, St George's Square, the dome of Our Lady of Mount Carmel jostling an Anglican spire for primacy of the sky.
My Rough Guide called Floriana "a quiet little town that feels like a suburb of Valletta" and that was pretty much what it was. Monuments to dead airmen and independence, a Roman square with stone columns spaced about like stumps in a forest clearing, a cat-feeding station, a boarded up church with Sex room? scrawled on what used to be the window, a look-out point over a white and beige jumble of houses and church domes and factory chimneys as if someone had managed to squeeze a provincial Italian city together with a Lancashire milltown and the outskirts of Fez. 
I passed back through the bus station and into a square straight out of a Disneyland Mediterranean village. Porticoed arcades, painted wooden balconies, a Burger King and a craft shop with Clearance Sale, Factory Prices Inside pasted on the window. There were children playing hide and seek behind the tomb in Hastings Gardens and a five-a-side pitch built into the battlements. I walked down Republic Street, the spine of the city. Past St John's Co-Cathedral the sights came thick and fast: the National Library, Manoel Theatre, the Grand Master's Palace, St George's Square, the dome of Our Lady of Mount Carmel jostling an Anglican spire for primacy of the sky.
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