When the Order of St John started building Valletta on Mount Sceberras, its architects and engineers faced a serious problem – how uneven the terrain was, highs and lows, rises and throughs.

They believed a relative flatness could be achieved by slicing off the high points and using the excavated rocks to fill in the valleys.

Work started on this mammoth project but had to stop halfway through because “not enough donkeys could be found in Malta”.

The only time in history when this lament seemed justified.

This resulted in irregular levels in the streets, joined by flights of stairs, some quite daunting – even immortalised in poetry.

Postcard of Strada S. Lucia used in 1910

From one of the postcard sets by Geo Fürst, Strada Santa Lucia

Lord Byron, disabled by a painful clubfoot, loathed them. In his 1811 Farewell to Malta, he recorded what he thought of them: “Adieu, ye cursed streets of stairs! How surely he who mounts you swears!”

Though Valletta’s street panorama has remained virtually unchanged since the 1570s, some street stairs have disappeared. I know of two stretches – one certain and the other probable. The steep slope in St Paul Street, from South to St John Street originated as a long flight of stairs, from side to side. Nineteenth-century engravings show uninterrupted stairs from left to right. Wheeled vehicles could not pass through.

The steep slope in Old Bakery Street flanking the General Workers’ Union building was almost certainly stepped from side to side.

Strada San Giovanni, a postcard by Richard Ellis

A Salvatore Lorenzo Cassar postcard of Strada Teatro

Strada Santa Lucia, in a postcard by Salvatore Lorenzo Cassar

Then the stepped masonry was removed and a wide central ribbon allowed carts and calesses to utilise the whole length of St Paul Street.

I believe the high incline in Old Bakery Street, flanked by the General Workers’ Union building, followed the same fate, though I have no documentary confirmation of this.

The Result Studio, Sliema, published this postcard of the stairs flanking the British Kingsgate.

Early postcard publishers revelled in Valletta’s stepped streets – they had something obviously photogenic about them. Lesser photographers made use of an obvious vertical format. Camera artists like Geo Fürst experimented with horizontal compositions.

Strada San Giovanni, postcard by Geo Fürst

Today’s Old Theatre Street in an early 1930s postcard by Geo Fürst

All images from the author’s collections

Pre-war Strada Levante, by Geo Fürst