Valletta's baroque skyline is quietly becoming a rooftop lido, and the old Savoy cinema wants in
The capital already swims on the roofs of the Embassy, the Rosselli and half its palazzo hotels. Now the old Savoy cinema joins in with a 60-room hotel, two more pools, a wellness suite and a fourth floor so exclusive it is invisible from the street.
Good news for the Valletta skyline, which is to gain a floor you are not supposed to notice.
The old Savoy building on Republic Street, a Spar supermarket at ground level, is to become a 60-room hotel, and its centrepiece is a brand-new fourth floor, complete with a breakfast terrace and a rooftop pool. The application is careful to specify that neither the new fourth floor nor the third floor beneath it should be visible from street level on Triq ir-Repubblika; the third floor, currently in plain view, is to be quietly set back out of sight. Valletta is therefore to receive a fourth floor and a swimming pool that, from the pavement, officially do not exist, and to lose sight of a floor it already has: the most discreet amenities the capital has ever been offered, on the firm understanding that you will not look up.
Another length on the skyline
Valletta is, by now, comfortably stocked with rooftop pools: guests already swim several storeys above the Grand Harbour at a good number of the capital’s converted palazzos. The Savoy proposes to add two more, an indoor pool and a rooftop one, four floors up behind a parapet, in a city whose skyline of domes and belfries has stood largely unchanged since the Order laid it out on a grid. To make room, part of the third floor will be demolished, a manoeuvre the application calls a “better stepped transitioning massing,” the most graceful phrasing yet devised for the act of getting taller. A wellness suite completes the set, because a World Heritage capital can evidently never have quite enough places to dry off.
The last picture show
The walls have kept busy. They began, in the sixteenth century, as Casa Caccia, a stately home; were flattened by a bomb in 1941; rose again as the Savoy cinema, where the capital sat together in the dark through the 1950s; settled into a shopping arcade, then offices, and now, barely three years after that last refit, a hotel. Each conversion a little quieter than the one before. Becoming a hotel is simply the final reel: the lights come up, the audience is asked to leave, and the room is let by the night. In the truest sense, the last picture show.
One of the larger ones now
Valletta is quietly filling with hotels, each one resetting the bar for the next. A 60-room hotel would once have been a landmark in so small a capital. Today it registers as merely one of the larger ones, trailing the Embassy at 81 rooms and the new Ruby, opening this year on Strait Street at 88. The bar keeps climbing, the rooms keep multiplying, and the city the Knights built to be lived in is re-rated, floor by floor, in keys.
Valletta has spent four hundred years perfecting how it looks from the street. It is now working on the view from a rooftop pool you are not meant to see, four floors above the Spar.
