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The Best of Malta
For the 400,000 Brits who visit every year, Malta is an easy country, perhaps too easy: it has plenty of sun and sea, English is a co-official language, driving is on the left, you find British dailies on the newsstands, and some supermarkets stock Marmite. But here is a little known fact about the Maltese islands, which are collectively barely half the size of London: the islands have five World Heritage Sites, the entire capital Valletta and four Neolithic Temples, and after UNESCO's Secretary-General nominated Malta's sister island Gozo to be included for the title in its entirety, a third of the islands' territory could be designated for World Heritage status.
After 3,000 years of foreign rule (the islands achieved independence from Britain in 1964), the Maltese brace themselves for the summer tourist invasion with some swagger. In Malta, the mainland (sometimes called `city-state' owing to its jumble of towns of seamless urban sprawl on the northeastern shore), summers are manic, crowded, hot, and every weekend there is a festa - noisy three-day affairs of fireworks, brassbands, and inebriation in commemoration of parish saints. But Gozo, separated from the mainland by 8km of sea, remains unfazed in its rural backwardness; it's an idyllic writer's retreat of rural gentility, with stunning coastal scenery.
The best time to visit is during the shoulder months of Spring or Autumn when the islands are more genteel, the sun is still hot enough to pick up a tan and swim, and hotel prices are slashed. But the weather and the sea are a bonus: the principal allure is the islands' antiquities and the Baroque architecture. The legacy of the 7,000-year-old history is conveniently clustered in a handful of localities - Valletta, the capital; Mdina, the old capital; and the Neolithic Temples in the south of Malta - all of which can be toured in a week. A two-week visit, meanwhile, leaves a handful of free, lazy days to soak up Gozo, which is walkable from tip to tip in four hours.
Valletta
Spurred by the confidence of victory after they had beaten back the Ottoman Empire's formidable invasion force in the Great Siege of 1565, the Knights of St John (now the Knights of Malta) embarked on the ambitious project of building Valletta from scratch. The Pope's architect Francesco Lapparelli designed the city on a grid street-plan to facilitate natural ventilation, and an army of 8,000 workers, mostly slaves, were deployed to start working on the 100-metre-high fortifications that girdle the city.
Harking back to the Crusades, the Knights were wealthy European aristocrats who volunteered themselves for the Christian faith as monks and warriors. In the seventeenth century they embraced Baroque for its symbolism of power and prestige, and set about transforming Valletta into the opulence of Baroque. Valletta still bears witness to that period of Knightly splendour.
The town is less than two kilometres in length, and dissected east to west along its spinal precinct, Republic Street, along which most sights are situated. The top attraction is St John's Co-Cathedral, the former Knights' conventual church, with its austere, Mannerist exterior morphing to an interior where Baroque blazes across its walls like an uncontrolled inferno; it's home to Michelangelo Caravaggio's masterpiece titled The Beheading of St John, elected by many art historians as the best painting of the seventeenth century. Nearby, the Grand Master's Palace, which has been the seat of rule since its construction in the 1570s, still retains the original sumptuous dcor - lunettes and damask caking the walls, portraits of the Knights and British monarchs, timber-coffered ceilings studded with gold-gilded pendants, and marble coats of arms inlaid on the floors. In Manoel Theatre, a small, oval theatre built in 1731, Italian Knights performed operas and French Knights were renowned for their comedies; the acoustics are so finely-tuned you can hear orchestra conductors flipping the pages.
Valletta's crucial role in World War II is recreated in the dungeons called the Lascaris War Rooms, the nerve-centre for the Royal Navy's Mediterrenean Fleet, and where General Eisenhower plotted the invasion of Italy. When you get tired of exploring, you can retreat to the breezy Upper Barakka, a public garden perched atop the fortifications on the landfront. The panorama across the Grand Harbour takes in the medieval townscape of the fortified towns called the Three Cities - a view John Updike described as "fairytale" in his short story collection Forty Stories.
Mdina
Projecting its hulk on a ledge of land in the geographical centre of the island, the old capital was probably founded by the Byzantines, although its present size dates to Arab rule (870-1090AD). This small fortified town of 400 inhabitants is one of the best-preserved Baroque towns in the world, and thanks to its meandering alleys (designed as such to confound an invading army) it is virtually car-free.
Mdina is a sight in its entirety, with its handsome fortifications pierced by Baroque gates, its forbidding convents, its various churches, its palaces of the Grand Masters and Bishops, and its urban fabric of Baroque and medieval townhouses. The later, the oldest of which dates to 1233, are called Siculo-Norman after their smorgasbord of architectural styles - Arabic, Sicilian and Norman. The town also holds the island's cathedral built in 1693, a massive church that demonstrates Lorenzo Gafa's ingenuity: unlike his peers, he opted for a Baroque style that was minimally ornate, and instead lent monumentality to his creations by fiddling with the proportions of composition.
Neolithic Temples
Nothing in Malta has generated as much interest, speculation and reverence as the Neolithic Temples: the impressive repertoire of artefacts found in the temples is exhibited at the National Museum of Archeology in Valletta. Built between 3,600 and 2,500BC by the islands' first inhabitants who had migrated from Sicily, the temples were dedicated to the worship of fertility represented by what archeologists call `fat ladies', which were statues of supple proportions. Twenty-five temples have so far been discovered, including two burial shrines burrowed underground; five of the temples are open for visitors.
Essentially, the temples were domed caverns of impressive proportions. Their spherical chambers propagate in pairs, like the figure eight without the tie in the middle, and leading to an inner, lobed shrine. They were constructed of megaliths as large as beds and their interior, as all the artefacts within, was painted with red ochre in more fertility symbolism - the colour of blood, the life stream. In reliefs, the ubiquitous spiral formations are thought to represent the Neolithic culture worldview of cyclical continuity, including rebirth.
A small band of vociferous archeologists claim the Neolithic culture was a Goddess-worshipping, matriarchal society. It's a theory that has generated immense interest in the temples, and every year thousands of people make the pilgrimage to Malta to visit the temples. The apparent sophistication of the Neolithic culture is awe-inspiring; after all, this was the first architectural civilisation. In Tarxien, the cathedral of the Neolithic era that towered four-storeys high in its heyday, three temples are meshed into one complex; on the south coast, the temple of Mnajdra is aligned to sunrise on the equinoxes.
The highlight of the Neolithic is the Hypogeum, an underground necropolis and temple that took a millenia to gouge on three levels underground. It's a surreal sight with a potent atmosphere, and its chambers mimic the interior design of the above-ground temples when they were intact. Sir Temi Zammit, who excavated the Hypogeum, wrote in his notes, "An air of profound mystery pervades the place."
Gozo
In his soujourn in Gozo in 1866, the English poet Edward Lear described the island's coastal scenery as "pomskizillious and gromphiberrous.there being no other words to describe its magnificence." Much of the coast remains largely unblemished, sheer seacliffs poked with a few miniature fjords on the south coast and a series of bluffs and valleys opening onto sandy beaches or clay promontories on the north coast. Inland, terraced fields step up to the table-top hills and down into deep valleys of bamboo beards. The pleasant towns are dominated by their respective massive parish churches, around which concentric rings of amber-hued townhouses are clustered.
Gozo mostly attracts two types of tourists: a crop of more independent visitors in search of rural serenity, including expatriates with second homes, and a trickle of scuba divers who swear that the island offers the best scuba diving in the Mediterranean.
Practicalities:
Travel Options
The cheapest option is to opt for a package tour - seven-nights in the high season, including flight and accommodation in a two- or three-star hotel costs under 500. There are dozens of tour operators to choose from, and one of the best places to shop around is at . The problem with package tours is that you don't have a choice on where to stay and you're likely to be bundled up in Bugibba, a drab resort of high-rises on the north shore. If travelling independently, Air Malta and British Airways operate a couple of daily scheduled flights from London, and weekly flights from other major UK cities, which cost around 150 in the low season and up to 300 in the high season.
Where to Stay (high season prices)
For budget travellers, a hostel bunk will cost 3.50 nightly, while a guesthouse where you share a room will set you back 10. A basic hotel room goes at around 15 per night, and double that amount will get you a room in a four-star hotel - en suite, with a TV, telephone and breakfast. If you're a group, the best value option might be to rent a self-catering apartment. In Gozo, the restored farmhouses are lovely and comfortable: a basic yet fully equipped farmhouse in a town costs about 30 a day, and a luxury farmhouse with swimming pool and garden in the countryside is priced at around 85 a day in the high season.
Transport
The bus service in Malta is extensive and cheap (average fare is 25p), but you have to put up with post-war vehicles that rattle on worn-out suspensions, and leg space is cramped. The good news is that, given the short distances, you never have to spent more than an hour on a bus journey; the bad news is that there are virtually no buses between 11pm and 5am. Taxi fares are on par with London prices, and taxis are known to rip off tourists as a matter of routine: agree on a fee beforehand. Renting a car gives you flexibility, and prices are marginally cheaper than the UK. In Gozo, public transport is skimpy; however, you can easily walk or rent a motorbike at around 5 a day.
Eating
The cuisine is based on Italian, French and Maltese (in itself a hybrid of Mediterranean cuisines), and standards are generally high; average prices for a three-course meal (excluding drinks) hover at around 15 per person. Fresh fish is abundant - eighty species of seafood are consumed - all year round, and this is what Maltese restaurants do best.
© Victor Paul Borg
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