Most of our journeys are made in pursuit of simple surface pleasures: a turquoise sea to swim in, the shade of a tamarisk tree, crayfish to eat, jewels to buy. Places, though, ripple with complexity. You may hanker for white beaches and palm trees yet later remember only the barefoot man in the rainstorm who asked you for your shirt; you may anticipate a week of museum culture and come back with memories of sun, scent and naked sunbathing on a hidden balcony. One sort of a holiday, in other words, can quickly metamorphose into another.
Malta presents itself as the Mediterranean island for anglophone beginners: a cheery collection of sunny beaches and boat rides, of seaview hotels and souvenir shops, where lovingly maintained Duple Dominant buses called Tiger Cub or Queen Mary will bounce you around the bay to a bar where you can sip lager and listen to Tom Jones as the sun goes down over a sea of golden silk. Recent developments, and use of the island's magnificent limestones rather than concrete or breeze block, have smartened the more threadbare patches, but much of it still looks like the poor man's Monaco, where long ribbons of coastal hotel development are interrupted only by slices of desolate rocky hillside and scrub-filled gully. Malta is smaller than the Isle of Wight yet a permanent home to 400,000 people; it welcomes 1.2 million tourists a year. The traffic, as you might expect, is awful; you will shower and wash in desalinated seawater; and most of what you will eat and drink comes steaming into Marsaxlokk Bay in containers.
Yet plunge down a layer or two beneath the surface, and this overcrowded, calcareous pimple adrift on a tideless sea can provide very different experiences, all of them unlocked and ignited by imagination.
The geological adventure, first of all, is a remarkable one. Malta, like Etna and Vesuvius, is tectonic collision wreckage, heaved up from the sea bottom as the African plate thumped the European plate. There was once much more of it; indeed the undersea ridge of which it is the remnant terrestrial part is thought by some to have enabled Africa's elephants to walk to Sicily. Its three component limestones, the funerary remains of fish and shellfish which died between seven and 30 million years ago, make the island brilliant in its whiteness, and lend its finest buildings an almost mouthwatering inner glow. The fossil pavement at Dwejra Point on neighbouring Gozo illlustrates these lost undersea worlds: scuba diving for those who can't swim.
Malta is also home to one of prehistory's great mysteries. Its 'temples' (we have no better word, since we don't know their precise function) are the world's oldest free-standing buildings. One thousand years before the Great Pyramid of Cheops made mathematics palpable, and 1500 years before Stonehenge bore witness to man's reverence for the universe, an astonishing culture of monumental construction flourished on Malta from around 4000 BCE. The lonely stones of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra on the wind-scoured and austere southwest of the island are, therefore, the distant ancestors of every building you have ever stepped into. If you want to visit the spectacular underground necropolis called the Hypogeum, which dates from the same period, you will need to book at least a month in advance via www.heritagemalta.org: only 80 tickets per day are available. What happened to the temple builders? They disappeared around 2500 BCE. Some think that, like the Easter Islanders, they pursued their aesthetic dreams to the point of extinction.
Massacre by invaders, though, has always been more likely on Malta, whose position is not only a key strategic one but which also possesses the most extensive natural harbour in the entire Mediterranean. Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Romans succeeded each other, and it was during Roman rule in around 60 CE that a Christian prisoner called Paul, on his way to trial and execution in Rome, was famously shipwrecked on the northeast coast. Two centuries of Arab domination may not have succeeded in displacing the island's deep-rooted and often flamboyant Christian tradition, but it marked Maltese culture no less indelibly via the place names and language still used today on the island. Their often uncompromising spelling (try asking the taxi driver to take you back to Xemxija or Xghajra after a drink or two) is the result of writing the sounds of Arabic in Latin script. Then came the Normans, the Angevins, the Aragonese and the Castilians, while the coast was constantly harried by Barbary pirates and assorted Mediterranean adventurers.
Much of my own visit to Malta was spent in the company of a sixteenth-century Italian arquebusier called Francisco Balbi di Correggio, watching one of the world's most dogged and bloody battles unfold. Correggio is described in the records of the Emilian town whose name he appended to his own as "a wandering poet … ever persecuted by men and by fortune", which perhaps explains why he had the vast ill-luck of finding himself serving the Holy Roman Emperor as a gunner on Malta at the moment Suleiman the Magnificent decided he was no longer going to tolerate the depradations of the Knights of St John on his merchant fleet. So began the Great Siege of Malta in 1565. Balbi's account, memorably translated and edited by the Mediterranean historian Ernle Bradford and published by Penguin, is plain and straightforward, perhaps because the Italian poet was writing in Spanish, but utterly rivetting in its vivid descriptions of the brutality, physical violence and macabre ingenuity of sixteenth century siege warfare. He was lucky to survive; fortune gave him at least that. Jump, with a headful of Balbi, onto one of the many cruises which set off from Sliema Creek to explore the intricacies of the Grand Harbour, and you will look with particular reverence at Fort St Elmo, Vittoriosa and Senglea as they loom above you.
That, of course, is if you are not already imagining the sinking, bomb-battered Ohio being nursed to her berth on August 15th 1942, thereby relieving the second Great Siege of Malta. Allied fighter planes and submarines operating out of Malta were as irritating to Africa-bound Axis Powers convoys in the Second World War as the ships of the Knights had been to Suleiman, which was why the Maltese endured more bombs per capita during that conflict than any other group of civilians anywhere; it won the entire population the George Cross. There are many accounts of these ear-shattering years, all of them gripping, and they layered my visit to the island with further layers of meaning and resonance.
Of course there are more conventional holiday pleasures, too - it was while swimming down the steep-sided Xlendi Bay on Gozo that I saw my first blue rock thrush, picking its way among the thyme plants; and the Upper Barracca Gardens in Valetta provides a fine eyrie to smoke an early evening cigar as you look down on the cruise-liner endomorphs waddling back to the womb-like embrace of their marine hotels. It's probably appropriate that the greatest picture on the island portrays an act of violence: Caravaggio's masterly Beheading of John the Baptist, painted while the homicidal artist was lying low on the island, can be seen in a curtained ante-chapel of the Co-Cathedral of St John in Valetta. The ancient walled city of Mdina, set inland away from the pirates, is shady, mysterious and quiet at siesta time. Wherever you go, though, take a book or two, and be ready to dissolve the present and travel back in time. Malta deserves it.
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