Cupola, St Francis of Assisi Church, Valletta

This week’s theme is V, for Valletta.

Valletta, like all of Malta, is quite religious .. after all, this is supposedly where St Paul was shipwrecked around 60AD – he was being sent to Rome as a political prisoner, but his ship was pounded ashore by storms at Malta.

The locals apparently took him and all the ship’s complement in and when Paul was (a) bitten by a poisonous snake and (b) was able to cure a leading Roman’s father of a serious fever, many of the locals converted to Christianity.

The Christian tradition has been very strong in Malta ever since, and there are churches everywhere.

In Valletta, the most famous is probably the Church of St Paul’s Shipwreck dating back to 1570 – but not far behind is the Francis of Assisi church, which began construction in 1598.

It was completely rebuilt about a century later – and then modernised in the 1920s, including the addition of the cupola featured in today’s #travelpic

Run by the Franciscan monks (well, Duh!) this is a small, quiet church – with much less ostentation than St Paul’s Shipwreck – or the even more full-on St John’s Co-Cathedral which lies between the two.

In fact, if you are at all religious (or, like me, simply an aficionado of churches and temples), there are perhaps a dozen or more churches in an eight-block easy walk in the central area of Valletta.