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Saints, History, and Romance
A roundup of Malta’s best attractions
The American Linda Eneix, 56, had been all over the world as a tour designer but had never heard of Malta. She recounted: “I saw a brochure about Malta, and thought, ‘Where is Malta and why would anyone want to go there?’ I was eventually drawn by the archaeological remains, and when I went to Tarxien Neolithic Temples, I was expecting to see excavation trenches. As I walked through the portal and confronted the bottom half of that giant ‘goddess’ I was astonished that I had never heard of such intact and fantastic remains, and I kept thinking, ‘How come nobody knows about this in North America?’ That’s all it took – I couldn’t get enough of Malta.”
Malta, whose three islands combined have a land area smaller than London, has a record number of World Heritage Sites, and more historical remains per square kilometre than anywhere else on earth. All the major eras in 7,000 years of Mediterranean history are represented in Malta. This is largely due to the islands’ strategic position in the centre of the Mediterranean, something that has led every regional power to fight over and occupy Malta (Malta eventually gained independence from Britain in the 1960s). Napoleon Bonaparte famously said in 1798 before he invaded: “If we take Malta, we shall be masters of the Mediterranean.”
The wave upon wave of occupiers has bequeathed the Maltese a textured cultural tapestry. Maltese culture has evolved like an amoeba: the Maltese absorbed the cultural influences of their rulers and then gave everything a Maltese spin. This has given the Maltese a self-confidence disproportional to the size of the country – or, as Evelyn Waugh, the British writer, put it in his 1930’s travel book, “the Maltese are unconscionably romantic.”
But in a tour of Malta where do you start and what do you leave out? Below is a digest of the highlights of Malta.
Valletta & The Three Cities
Rising on either side of the Grand Harbour, Valletta and the Three Cities are Malta’s most atmospheric towns, surrounded by several layers of massive fortifications. Valletta was built from scratch by the Knights of Malta (then called the Knights of St John, the crusaders who made their last stand in Malta) after victory against the Ottoman invasion in 1565. The design of the city, by the Pope’s architect Francesco Lapperelli, was highly innovative for its time: a grid street plan to facilitate natural ventilation, and a planning brief that stipulated the dimensions and decoration of each house in the city, even decreeing that every street corner had to have a niche dedicated to a Catholic saint. Valletta is also girdled by impressive fortifications and has elaborate defence arrangements in a system of towers, forts, and underground tunnels. The city further benefited from the Knights’ wealth in the seventeenth and eighteenth century when the Knights instituted an extensive makeover of Valletta in the then new style of baroque.
Now one of the most fascinating baroque cities in the world, a World Heritage Site in its entirety, Valletta stands as a legacy to the Knights of Malta. Their former conventual church, now St John’s Co-Cathedral, is arguably the most opulent church in the world, holding Caravaggio’s masterpiece, The Beheading of St John the Baptist. Their former palace and their auberges (inns of residence for regional groupings of Knights) are awash with art; their theatre, Manoel Theatre, is one of Europe’s finest and oldest. Valletta is also Malta’s cultural hub, home to the national archaeological museum, two national art galleries, two World War II museums, a dozen resplendent churches, and a concentration of Malta’s best restaurants. It’s a small city, about 2km at its longest point, but you can easily spend a day or two touring its sights, and soaking in the historic atmosphere contained in its 400-year-old urban fabric.
Across the Grand Harbour, the Three Cities – Vittoriosa, Senglea, and Cospicua – are older than Valletta, and more fortified. On the landfront they are encircled by two sets of semi-circular fortifications. Vittoriosa holds the main sights – the Inquisitor’s Palace, Fort St Angelo (Malta’s oldest fort), a spate of churches, and the quarter known as the Collacchio, a maze of alleys hemmed in by two-storey baroque townhouses where the Knights lived between their arrival in Malta in 1530 and their shift to Valletta in the 1570s. The story of Vittoriosa’s maritime history – this is where the Knights based their formidable naval fleet and the British based the headquarters of the Mediterranean fleet – is now told in the Maritime Museum. The Three Cities were intensely bombed during World War II (Senglea was practically razed to the ground), and the grim story of how the inhabitants survived is told in the labyrinth of tunnels burrowed deep underground where the inhabitants found refuge from the aerial bombardment, now called the Malta At War Museum.
Mdina and Rabat:
Another fortified town built on a crag close to Malta’s geographical centre, Mdina is Malta’s oldest city originally built by the Romans, then altered by the Arabs (870–1090AD) to its present footprint. Mdina’s buildings date to the medieval ages when the town was Malta’s capital, home to the ecclesiastical authorities, Malta’s cathedral, and palaces that formerly belonged to the nobles. Its houses are a smorgasbord of diverse architectural touches – the oldest extant building, erected in the thirteenth century, is a hybrid of Sicilian and Norman architectural forms – and its meandering alleyways (they were designed as such to confuse invaders) have gladly barred modernity, making much of the town inaccessible to vehicles.
Contagious with Mdina, the large town of Rabat grew out of Mdina’s shadow as over-spill. Its prime sights are two sets of early-Christian catacombs dating to the fourth century (the Christians buried their death in catacombs outside the city walls), and some of the sarcophagi still have original skeletons 1,500 years old. The town also has a couple of museums, convents, and a large palace built by the Knights as their rural retreat.
Neolithic Temples:
Malta’s Neolithic Temples have generated intense scholarly interest, and five of them are World Heritage Sites. Built between 3,600 and 2,500BC, the temples are the oldest built structures on earth, massive megalithic structures whose roofs have collapsed but are otherwise intact. They represent something of an architectural feat, and the artefacts found within are proof that the Neolithic community was the most artistically advanced civilisation at its time. Heaps of so-called ‘fat ladies’, which are supple human stone sculptures, were discovered in the temples; these are larger and more artistically exquisite than anything else found elsewhere in the Med.
The Neolithic intrigue is deepened by some intractable puzzles, the first of which is why a small Neolithic community in small islands built so many temples – about 24 major temples have been discovered so far. Another puzzle is what caused the apparent abrupt demise of this Neolithic community, whose remains and traces came to an end at around 2,500BC.
Now five major temples are open to the public and each of them is stylistically different. Most impressive is the Hypogeum, an underground temple gouged on three levels in the bedrock – it took a thousand years to dig, using deer’s antlers and stone mallets, and it was still a work-in-progress when the Neolithic community met its sudden inexplicable end. Its central shrine, the Holy of Holiest, is full of drama, an egg-shaped chamber with mysterious portals and windows leading to lobed chambers, its walls illusory in their distension and protraction; in another room there is a hole that, when spoken into, amplifies a baritone voice to reverberate throughout the complex.
Churches and Catholic Festivals:
Malta’s distinction as the most Catholic country in the world is very visible: the islands have more than 350 churches, most of them grand baroque affairs that dominate the skyline, built during a nation-wide drive to replace the modest medieval churches with baroque edifices in the seventeenth century. Top of the list as must-see-churches is St John’s Co-Cathedral, arguably the most opulent church in the world, and a close second is St Paul’s Cathedral, an impressive architectural set-piece that has Malta’s most elegant dome. St Paul’s Shipwreck Church in Valletta is another artistic splurge, and it holds two remains associated with St Paul: the column on which he was beheaded, and a fragment of the saint’s wrist-bone. Mosta Dome is firmly on the tourist circuit, but its fame has more to do with its size – it is claimed to have Europe’s largest dome – than its artistic merit, and the same applies to the Xewkija parish church in Gozo, which is said to be Europe’s third-largest church (it is some six metres higher than St Paul’s Cathedral in London). More interesting stylistically is St Mary’s Church in Attard, designed in 1613 in a Renaissance style, the most exceptional of the pre-baroque churches.
In Gozo, St Mary’s Cathedral in the Citadel is another studious architectural set-piece, and when the funds ran out during construction, the Italian Antonio Manuele painted a trompe l’oeil on the flat drum of the dome inside the church: the result is spectacular, as standing in the nave you’d never tell that the dome is flat and that the painting is illusory. St George’s Basilica in Rabat, Gozo, is caked in marble, has a fanciful canopied altar, and some invaluable paintings. In the west of Gozo the Gharb church has an unusual concave façade, and the nearby Ta Pinu Basilica erupts in open countryside at the spot where a peasant allegedly had an apparition of the Madonna, and the church was built on-site to accommodate the waves of pilgrims.
The largest festivals in Malta are also organised by the Catholic church. Good Friday sees massive processions of biblical characters, as well as hooded-and-robed penitence bearers who carry heavy crosses or drag bundles of chains tied to their ankles through the streets. Catholic events reach a fever pitch in the summers when eighty-plus Catholic town feasts are organised by each town. These consist of three days of Catholic adulation, brass-bands, and fireworks. The pyrotechnic shows are the greatest allure of these feasts; the Maltese produce some of the best fireworks worldwide.
Gozo:
Malta’s smaller sister island is more different than the main island in character than is suggested by the 8km sea-crossing. It is more rural, more conservative, quieter, and has an undulating hilly landscape and a rural tranquillity that hasn’t gone amiss: well-to-do Europeans increasingly buy second homes or retirement homes in Gozo. Visitors to Gozo are mostly families who visit for its relaxed old-style Mediterranean lifestyle.
Gozo has its fair share of historical sights: the largest Neolithic Temple in the islands; the old castle, a bulwark set on the island’s second highest hill; the old quarter of Rabat, the capital, a meandering hive of alleys lined with baroque townhouses; and many atmospheric town squares. And of course churches; Gozo has 57 churches, or one church for every 500 inhabitants (if that doesn’t sound impressive, consider this: if New York had to have a church for every 500 inhabitants, it would have 18,000 churches).
Yet Gozo’s greatest attraction is its varied coastal landscapes. Edward Lear, the British artist-at-large, called Gozo’s coast “pomskizillious and gromphiberrous…there being no other words to describe its magnificence.” Much of the coast remains largely undeveloped, sheer seacliffs poked with a few miniature fjords on the south coast and a series of bluffs and valleys opening onto sandy beaches on the north coast. The sea is equally attractive, and Gozo is said to offer the most spectacular scuba diving in the Mediterranean.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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