Valletta

Valletta was designed in one campaign by men who had just survived the great siege of 1565, which is why Europe's smallest capital is also her most reasoned: a grid of honey-colored limestone laid over a peninsula, every street either running to the sea or climbing from it in stairs, every corner calculated to catch the harbour breeze. The knights built a fortress; four centuries have softened it into a city.

The sensible traveller walks the grid slowly — it is one square kilometer and refuses to be rushed —, pays St John's its full hour for the tumbling gold interior and the two Caravaggios in the oratory, takes coffee on a balcony street, and crosses the Grand Harbour to the Three Cities in a dgħajsa, the gondola's Maltese cousin, for the view of Valletta whole: prow-shaped, sand-gold, riding her peninsula like a ship.

The Guide's honesty: the siesta is structural — early afternoon belongs to closed doors, and the wise adjust —; August turns the limestone into a kiln, and the sea is the correct answer; the Barrakka gardens' noon cannon is aimed at tourists, agreeably. Malta drives on the left and her buses are an adventure sold as infrastructure: allow slack.