The fisherman didn't speak any English, and I don't speak a word of Maltese, but he handed me a chunk of bread torn from a loaf wedged between the anchor rope and the gunwale, and somehow that was enough.
I'd found the harbor by getting deliberately lost. Valletta's tourist circuit ends at the Upper Barrakka Gardens, where everyone points their cameras at the Three Cities across the Grand Harbour and calls it done. I walked the other direction — down Merchants Street, then left through an alley that smelled of diesel and dried paint — until the cobblestones ran out and the boats began.
The luzzu are impossible not to stare at. These flat-bottomed wooden fishing boats, painted in crayon-bright bands of red and yellow, bob in clusters along the quay. Each one bears an eye of Osiris on its prow — an ancient symbol the Phoenicians left behind, still watching the water three thousand years later. I crouched at the edge of the dock to photograph one and nearly fell in. The fisherman — sixties, weathered in the precise way of men who've spent their lives arguing with the sea — caught my elbow and laughed without a sound, shoulders shaking.