City Gate

Renzo Piano's bold contemporary entrance to the historic city

City Gate is the main entrance to Valletta, rebuilt for the 2018 European Capital of Culture year to a design by Renzo Piano. The new gate is a straightforward cut through the bastion walls — more incision than arch — flanked by Piano's new Parliament building on one side and the ruins of the Royal Opera House (now the Pjazza Teatru Rjal) on the other. The design was deliberately restrained to let the surviving Baroque fortifications dominate.

The area around City Gate has been transformed into a piazza since the rebuild, replacing a road junction that previously pushed traffic through the heart of the approach to the city. The bus terminus sits just outside, making this the arrival point for almost all visitors coming from the airport or elsewhere in Malta. The Parliament building is open to the public on the ground level and the architecture is worth inspecting at close range.

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The decision to commission Renzo Piano for Valletta's City Gate was controversial in Malta. Piano's design demolished the 1960s gate and its adjacent parliament building — a modernist structure widely considered an eyesore — and replaced them with new buildings that used locally quarried limestone throughout. The new Parliament building, open on the ground floor to the public, is heated and cooled almost entirely through the thermal mass of its stone, drawing on traditional Maltese building techniques.