Christ the King Monument, Floriana

Where it sits. Floriana is the buffer town between Valletta and the rest of Malta, occupying the neck of the Sciberras peninsula immediately outside the capital's land front. Everything arriving in Valletta by road passes through it. The town is laid out along a broad central axis running from the Portes des Bombes at the landward end to the city ditch at the far end, with Grand Harbour on one side and Marsamxett on the other, and it covers less than a square kilometre with a resident population of roughly two thousand. Because the Order treated the whole neck as a field of fire, Floriana is unusually open for a Maltese town: wide avenues, long tree-lined promenades and two enormous public squares, in a country where open space is scarce.

Why it exists. The Order commissioned a second line of fortifications across the peninsula to keep any future besieging army out of artillery range of Valletta itself. Pope Urban VIII sent the military engineer Pietro Paolo Floriani of Macerata, who arrived in 1635 and drew the outer enceinte that still bears his name. Work started in 1636 and dragged on for the better part of a century, producing a hornwork, a covered way and a deep ditch across the whole neck. The ground inside was left empty as an esplanade for decades. Only in the eighteenth century did houses, a parish church and barracks fill it in, which is why Floriana's civil architecture is later and plainer than Valletta's, with tall terraces of flat-fronted limestone and long uniform streets rather than Baroque set pieces.

The Granaries. The single most memorable space here is Saint Publius Square, an open expanse paved with dozens of circular stone caps set flush into the ground. Each cap seals a bell-shaped grain silo cut into the rock beneath, part of a strategic reserve dug so a besieged island could feed itself. The pits are perhaps ten metres deep and held wheat for years at a time in the dry, sealed rock. The square above them has become Malta's default ceremonial ground, used for open-air Mass, political mass meetings and concerts, and it is one of the few places on the island where you can watch a crowd of tens of thousands assemble.

What else is on the ground. The parish church of St Publius closes the square, begun in the 1730s to a design by Giovanni Barbara, extended repeatedly through the nineteenth century, gutted by bombing in the Second World War and rebuilt. Behind it the Maglio Gardens run for several hundred metres along the old Mall, laid out in 1656 by Grand Master Lascaris as an exercise ground where young knights could work off their energy, and now a shaded avenue lined with busts of Maltese writers and politicians. The Argotti Botanic Gardens at the Marsamxett end began as the private garden of a bailiff of the Order and became a public botanic collection under the British, with a substantial succulent and cactus holding, now run by the University of Malta. Sarria Church, a compact circular building rebuilt in 1676 to a design by Lorenzo Gafà as a plague votive offering, holds a set of canvases by Mattia Preti. The Wignacourt water tower of 1615 marks the terminus of the aqueduct that brought spring water down from the Rabat plateau. Antonio Sciortino's bronze of Christ the King, made for the 1913 Eucharistic Congress, stands at the head of the main avenue.

The gates. The Portes des Bombes is the town's landward threshold and one of Malta's most misunderstood monuments. Built in 1721 as a single Baroque arch in the outer line, it was doubled with a matching second arch in the nineteenth century under British rule, and the flanking curtain walls were later removed for traffic, leaving the twin arches standing free in the middle of a roundabout like a stage set. The effect is accidental, but it is the first piece of Order architecture most arriving visitors see.

Getting there and timing. Floriana is a ten-minute walk from Valletta's City Gate, straight down the main axis; every bus into the capital stops here first, and the Valletta bus terminus sits on the boundary beside the Triton Fountain. The Phoenicia Hotel, built in the late 1930s at the edge of the ditch, anchors the Valletta end. Most travellers pass through Floriana without stopping, which is exactly why it is worth an hour: the Granaries, the Maglio and the Argotti give you the scale of the fortifications from the inside, without the crowds pressing along Republic Street a few hundred metres away. Spring is best, when the gardens are actually green; by August the open squares are unshaded and fierce.