Saluting Battery
Working gun platform below a garden terrace, firing restored cannon across the harbour every day.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Saluting Battery in Valletta starts before dawn on the ninth of September, seventeen seventy-five, when two cannon shots ring out over the harbour and neither of them is a salute. It follows a priest named Don Gaetano Mannarino, the churchmen and laymen who joined him, and Grand Master Francisco Ximénez, who ruled the island. It also turns your eyes to the arched terrace above the guns, once the Italian knights' private garden, and the rumour attached to its missing roof.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
St. Barbara Bastion
Harbour-facing bastion once run by the gunners' brotherhood, lined with trees and period houses.
Fort St Angelo
Waterfront citadel, once the Knights' headquarters, that held out through a sixteenth-century siege.
Fort St Elmo and the National War Museum
Star-shaped sixteenth-century fort that bore the Great Siege's first assault, now a military history museum.
Upper Barrakka
Arcaded bastion-top garden with sweeping Grand Harbour views and a panoramic lift to the waterfront.
Fortifications Interpretation Centre
Sixteenth-century storehouse turned museum of military architecture, with detailed fortress models.
Manoel Island
Harbour island with a Knights-era star fort, rebuilt baroque chapel and old quarantine hospital.