Fort Ricasoli

Where it sits. Fort Ricasoli stands on the flat promontory known as Gallows' Point, on the northern shore of Rinella Bay in Kalkara, directly commanding the entrance to the Grand Harbour. Its guns and those of Fort St Elmo, on the opposite headland in Valletta, once crossed fire over the harbour mouth, and the two forts still frame that entrance for every ship that comes in. It is the largest fort in Malta by a wide margin, enclosing tens of hectares of open ground behind a land front of bastions and a long sea wall, and it has been on Malta's UNESCO tentative list since 1998 as part of the Knights' fortifications around the harbours.

The story behind it. The Order had wanted a work here for decades before it could pay for one. Construction ran from 1670 to 1698, on designs by the Piedmontese military engineer Antonio Maurizio Valperga, who was working on the Cottonera Lines at the same time. It was funded in large part by a single donation from a Tuscan knight, Fra Giovanni Francesco Ricasoli, and it carries his name in consequence. The plan is a classic bastioned front across the neck of the promontory, with a deep ditch, ravelin and covertway on the landward side and long batteries facing the sea, plus barracks, magazines, a chapel and cisterns inside.

Blood on the parade ground. Ricasoli's most notorious episode came under British rule. The Froberg Regiment, raised in the eastern Mediterranean on promises that were not kept and garrisoned at the fort, mutinied in April 1807. The mutineers seized Ricasoli, turned its guns on the harbour, held out for several days against a siege by their own side, and the affair ended with an explosion in a powder magazine and a round of executions. Later in the nineteenth century parts of the fort served as a military hospital, and during the Second World War the seaward works were badly damaged by bombing directed at the harbour entrance. After decommissioning in the 1960s the fort was left to weather, and sea storms have taken out sections of the outer walls.

On screen. Since the 1990s Ricasoli's enormous empty interior has made it the standard site for large exterior sets in Malta, because a production can build a city block inside a fort with its own security perimeter and a sea horizon on three sides. The most consequential build was the Roman arena for Gladiator in 2000, whose lower tiers were constructed inside the fort and completed digitally. Productions that have used the site include:

• Gladiator (2000), and its sequel more than twenty years later
• The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)
• Troy (2004), which raised the walls of Troy on the parade ground
• Agora (2009), for ancient Alexandria
• Game of Thrones season one (2011), for King's Landing exteriors
• Assassin's Creed (2016) and Napoleon (2023)

How the real place differs. What ends up on camera is almost never the fort itself. Ricasoli supplies flat ground, a sightline to open water and a genuinely period stone backdrop; everything else is scaffolding, plaster and post-production. The fort's own architecture — the ditch, the bastion faces, the eighteenth-century gate with its carved arms — is usually just out of frame. Standing outside it, the impression is not of a film set at all but of a very large, very tired eighteenth-century fortress with grass growing out of the parapets and swifts nesting in the embrasures.

Getting there and seeing it. This is not a site you can walk into. Fort Ricasoli is leased for film production and is closed to general visitors; the gate is manned and the interior is often an active set. That leaves three good ways to see it. The best is from the water: any harbour cruise from Sliema or the Three Cities passes close under the sea walls and gives you the full length of the front. The second is from the Valletta side — the tip of Fort St Elmo, the breakwater bridge or St Elmo Point look straight across the harbour mouth at it. The third is by road: the lane down to Rinella in Kalkara brings you to the fort's outer gate and along part of the land front, and the small bay below is a pleasant place to sit. Restoration work has been carried out on parts of the land front in recent years, and there is periodic talk of opening sections of the fort, so it is worth checking current status before planning. Combine a visit with Fort Rinella, ten minutes away along the coast, which is open and staffed.