About
Productions in the rooms they belong to.
The producer
Valletta Resounds is a series of immersive music and theatre productions staged in Valletta’s most storied venues, performed by exceptional local talent and produced by Udjenza.
The premise is simple and it is not a gimmick: some rooms in this city carry their own story, and a performance staged inside one of them does something a theatre cannot. The Oratory at St John’s Co-Cathedral holds the only painting Caravaggio ever signed, and it is the room he was expelled in. Sailors’ Paradise on Strait Street served the Mediterranean fleet for a century and never stopped being a bar.
The Caravaggio Experience premiered in 2023 and passed its 100th performance in October 2025, having welcomed more than 9,000 people. A run length that is genuinely rare in Malta. Sailors in the City Experience followed it into Strait Street.
Every production is performed by critically acclaimed Maltese musicians, singers and actors. The cast rotates by date.
The venue
The Oratory, St John's Co-Cathedral
The conventual church built by the Order of the Knights of St John was completed in 1577, soon after the Great Siege, and dedicated to St John the Baptist. Its architect was the Order’s own military engineer, Gironimo Cassar, and the austere façade, buttressed by two bell towers topped with octagonal spires, reflects the sombre mood of an Order that had just survived a siege.
Inside, that austerity gives way entirely. Over the following centuries every Grand Master and a great many knights enriched the church with the best work of the leading artists of the day, transforming a plain Mannerist interior into one of the most extraordinary rooms in Europe. The Oratory and the sacristy were added in 1604.
Caravaggio arrived in Malta in July 1607, having fled Rome under sentence of death for killing a man in a brawl. He was received into the Order as a Knight of Obedience in July 1608, and while on the island painted The Beheading of St John the Baptist and St Jerome Writing, both still in the Co-Cathedral today. Within weeks of his investiture he was in trouble again, imprisoned at Fort St Angelo, and escaped the island before his trial. On 1 December 1608, in this Oratory, standing in front of The Beheading, he was expelled from the Order “like a rotten and fetid limb.”
The painting has never left the room it was made for. It is the only work Caravaggio ever signed.
The venue
Sailors' Paradise
99 Strait Street, Valletta VLT 1460
Not wheelchair accessible. Access is only possible via stairs.
Strait Street, The Gut, was for a century and a half the place where the Mediterranean fleet came ashore. A narrow lane of music halls, bars and dance clubs running the length of Valletta, it was where sailors from every navy that put into the Grand Harbour spent their pay and their shore leave. By the time the British fleet withdrew in 1979 the street had fallen quiet, and it stayed that way for decades.
Sailors’ Paradise is one of the rooms that survived. It is a working bar and, genuinely, a small museum: original artefacts line every wall, each with its own history in the street outside. Chesterfields, enamel advertising signs, wartime photographs, an anchor.
It is an unusually intimate place to stage a show. There is no stage. The performers work among the tables, close enough to touch, in the room where the stories they are telling actually happened.
On stage
The ensemble
Valletta Resounds is performed by an accomplished ensemble of Maltese musicians, singers and actors, among them some of Malta’s most esteemed sopranos, and instrumentalists working on Baroque harp, Baroque violin, Baroque cello, psaltery and the Co-Cathedral’s own organ.
The repertoire runs from Handel and Bach to the sacred Maltese music of Francesco Azzopardi, and on Strait Street to We’ll Meet Again, Roll Out The Barrel and Lili Marlene.
The cast rotates by date. Artists perform on different dates and the programme may be subject to slight changes.