Over long centuries, locomotive power depended exclusively on strong domesticated four-legged animals – in Malta, that meant horses, mules and donkeys. They made motion and transport easier for man.

The sole exceptions were sedan chairs, carried by slaves or servants, while the traveller enjoyed a comfortable, if bumpy, ride inside. The Maltese called them suġġetta, derived from Italian seggetta, a small chair, but also with a hint of subjection of the fatigued toiler to the prosperous traveller.

The Grand Master’s coach. Photo Courtesy of Heritage Malta

Horse-drawn carriages came into their own in the times of the knights, the number of horses coding the importance of the passenger: six or eight for the grand master; four, two or one the lower the traveller stood in the pecking order.

With the first paving of Valletta in soft-stone, only the Grand Master’s carriage was allowed, as the steel-rimmed wheels damaged the surfaces.

In the British period, two- and four-wheeled carriages of all shapes and for all uses in Malta followed European fashion

In the British period, two- and four-wheeled carriages of all shapes and for all uses in Malta followed European fashion.

My photo albums show a ‘canoe landau’ in Malta as early as 1874 and scores of other current models before mechanisation encroached.

Water carts were extensively used pre-World War II to keep down the dust in untarmacked streets.

An 18th-century sedan chair, now housed in the Birkirkara parish church.

A leisure two-wheeled cart, called xarretta, in the 1930s.

The katalett, used as a stretcher or as a hearse in the 1920s.

An ice-cream vendor mounted on a tricycle in the 1940s.

A funerary horse-drawn hearse in the 1940s.

A military hand-drawn fire tender in the 1930s.

Today, only the country cart (karrettun), the trotting race sulkies (serkin) and the typical karrozzin survive, the latter as mothballed indigenous tradition for tourists, limping into obsolescence.

I remember the last leisure xarretta (charrette in French) just post-World War II. No bread wagons, no fire tenders, no watering carts, no hand-pushed stretchers or hearses on wheels (katalett). Even their stately baroque horse-drawn counterparts have staged their own funeral in favour of internal combustion engines.

Bicycles, scooters and tricycles occupy the middle ground, basically mechanical but dependent on human muscle and sinews for motion.