Adventures In The Walled City

Typically we awoke late on Tuesday, partly due to our exploits the day before but largely due to our sense of laziness. We were awoken eventually by the delivery of the pillow I asked for on the previous day, before we had a breakfast of cheese sandwiches before heading out for the day.

Our destination this time was the cities of Rabat and Mdina, which was the former capital of Malta before Valletta was built at the tail end (my favourite end) of the sixteenth century. Mdina, like Medina in Saudi Arabia, comes from the Arabic for "walled city" and approaching it on the bus, this is evident as it overlooks the rest of the island from its promontory, which is one of the highest points in the country.

We had travelled here by the bus, in this case routes 202 and 203, again run by Arriva but sub-contracted out to a private coach company. True to their British form, this was around 15 minutes late but the weather was good, sunny albeit with a rather cold blustery wind, so we didn't mind waiting, particularly as we had the bus shelter to shelter us from the wind. On our journey to Rabat/Mdina, we traversed through built up areas to the Mater Dai hospital, a huge construction in the centre of the island surrounded by what looked like a technological business park. The town of Birkirkara looked most inviting from the bus, such was its size and rare bustling nature in these sleepy islands while we also passed the tiny football stadium, reflecting the population of the country and the quality of play rather than the popularity of the sport here (in the evening, all of the restaurants and bars in Sliema were showing either England v Germany or Sweden v Portugal on giant screens). On our way up the hill to Rabat, we also managed to glimpse some farmland, the first we had seen on this rather barren and rocky outcrop, and so it was clear we were in somewhat different territory now.

An hour later, we made it to Mdina, where we climbed out of the bus, dodged the tourist-centric horse drawn carts (there is something about seeing a horse wearing a bridle that turns me on though) and headed over the drawbridge and into the walled city itself. The walls of the city are of golden stone which in the sun presents itself in a fairy tale like quality. The Phoenicians had a fortified city here back in 1000BC , with the Romans building a larger town here some years later. It was the Arabs though who constructed the strong walls and plunging moat - which is now a rather charming urban park and orchard - while it was in the medieval era when it gained its prestige, with the Maltese aristocracy favouring it and calling it the Noble City.

It wasn't until the building of Valletta when the city began to lose its importance and like Valletta you can walk around it in no time at all. Indeed it is smaller than the current Maltese capital but there is such a wealth of things to do here that you can easily spend all day here. As it was, we only had an afternoon but we gave a good stab at all of the attractions.

The main sight, and the first one to which we headed, is St Paul's Cathedral, one of only two cathedrals in the country (the other being St John's Co-Cathedral which I wrote about yesterday). The grandeur of this building is rather understated as it's purely made out of local stone but the two bell towers with pastel clocks upon them single this building out as unique. On top of these is a fire and serpent motif symbolising the saint's first miracle on Malta. Built in the baroque style between 1697 and 1702 by Lorenzo Gafa, the interior is very similar to that of the Cathedral in Valletta, with exquisite and intricate pastel coloured marble tombstones across the floor leading up to a huge alter. The church is more red than the one in Valletta, with scenes from the life of St Paul adorning the vault. Mattia Preti was here too, painting The Conversion of St Paul for the church.

With our entry ticket, we also got access to the adjacent museum, which was fascinating in its own right. The highlights for me were the huge coin collection covering every period of Malta's history from the Phoenicians through the Carthaginians to the Romans, Arabs, Aragonese, Sicilians, French and British, and the original wood block and copper engraving drawings of the pioneer of picture printing Albrecht Durer in the early part of the sixteenth century. I've studied the history of printing so it was a huge privilege to see the originals and examine the intricate drawings and massive detail gone into all of them. There was also a huge range of solid silver religious items including oil jugs, platters and the like.

During this, I started to feel a little queasy in my tummy so we opted to go for a bite to eat at the Fontanella Tea Gardens, a Maltese institution apparently and one the Hampshire couple we had met on Monday urged us to try. It is sat atop the walls themselves, giving a great panorama of the eastern half of the island, stretching over fields and across the cities to the sea in the distance, with boats bobbing up and down oblivious to being spied upon. It is clear why Mdina was of such strategic importance (the capital only switched to Valletta as the Knights of St John were predominantly a seafaring Order and so a coastal settlement was required) and we drunk in the view while eating sandwiches of a local meat while drinking Whittard's of Chelsea's English Breakfast Tea. It was a bit cold and windy up there, hence why our crisps were being blown around like crispy confetti but it was an excellent late lunch and it set us up nicely for our next museum.

After giving the excessively long queue for the toilets a miss, we went around the corner to check out the Palazzo Falson. This is a fantastically preserved medieval mansion, home of artist and philanthropist Olof Gollcher, who died in 1962. He served in both world wars, was highly decorated and was clearly a huge character, being a member of the Pipe Smoking Society and the Underwater History Preservation Society. The tour is self-guided - you get a headset and a sonic screwdriver which you zap towards infra-red sensors at various points around the house. An audio track then plays detailing the room and information on many of the things that you can see. It's done by a narrator and Gollcher himself, who has the typical charm you would expect from a British dandy of this era. At one point he said "etchings" in the same voice as Buzz Killington from Family Guy and I couldn't stop laughing. He also said being pilloried for drawing women with plunging necklines in the seventeenth century was a "huge shame". We went through all aspects of his house, the kitchen, his art studio with some of his works, the library, the bedroom and the chapel. There was also an armoury with a range of weapons including a pistol collection and medieval spears. It was hard not to have admiration for such a devout philanthropist whose intention it was to open the house to the public. And it's quite a beautiful house, set around a small courtyard with a beautiful fountain in the shape of a totem pole, with purple flowers casually draping themselves over the golden stonemasonry.

With the light fading - it gets dark quickly here at around 5.30pm at this time of year - and the museums closing, we caught a glimpse of the Carmelite Priory for free as someone had left the door open and no one was checking for tickets. Its baroque style is typical of the period and it's the only friary on Malta that's open to the public. We also failed to get to a couple of other museums too as they all closed at 5pm but I feel the Mdina Experience would have told us stuff we could get on Wikipedia while we could see the ruins of the Roman Villa through the fencing without the need to enter the small museum attached to it. All in all then a productive afternoon.

Rabat is some 200m away from Mdina and is effectively the settlement that's not inside the walled part. Our guidebook's map was a bit wrong so we had to ask some locals to guide us, but we soon found ourselves following enchanting narrow streets, dimly lit adding a sense of romanticism, until we reached the stupendous St Paul's Church (And The Grotto Of St Paul) which dominates the main square, Misrah il-Parocca. Built in 1675, the cave underneath the enormous church is where Paul is said to have preached during his stay in Malta. The statue of St Paul was gifted by the knights in 1748 and forms a centrepiece of the exterior of the building, along with a silver ship commemorating the 1900th anniversary of his shipwreck.

The St Paul's Catacombs and St Agatha's Crypt Catacombs were both closed but we hope to head back another day to do them. They are certainly eerie in the darkness though, lit only by the light of the full moon, so we could not wait to escape, particularly from the latter as the tall religious buildings placed the scene as if it was in a horror movie.

Rabat has little else to be honest, a few shops and one miserable looking bar on the main square. We opted to head back to the bus stop in Mdina, getting lost amongst the labyrinth of narrow streets once again. It was here that we did discover a bar which appeared to be set in a woman's living room. Her daughter was cleat doing homework on a PC in the corner while to get to the toilet you had to go through her kitchen and utility room replete with cooker, refrigerator and washing machine. She was also watching Maltese TV, something about pregnant women I think, but at least she served beer and we also tried some local crisps too, proving after yesterday that the locals prefer their crisps soggier than we do back home.

The bus journey back to Sliema was uneventful apart from the driver cutting up an ambulance driver at the hospital with his blue lights flashing. Once back, we opted to walk into Sliema proper, going across the peninsula rather than using the coast road that the bus uses, which makes the distances seem deceptively great. Walking through the streets, we stumbled across our local - or at least the bar nearest to the hostel - which is a family run business which doubles up as a candy store. So the register is on the bar itself and you can but chocolate and candy as you would in a newsagent and also a beer in the tables area if you wish. As the music wasn't loud and atrocious, and the staff friendly, this was the best bar of the six or so we had visited so far so after downing our drinks we promised to return another day.

Sliema is very much like a British town, down to the red phone boxes and post boxes, and the double yellow lines. The fare here is predominantly Italian though due to Malta's geographical proximity and historical connections with Sicily. While walking down The Strand looking for somewhere to eat, we noticed the local councilmen putting up the Christmas lights on the lampposts - exactly the right time of year in my opinion.

We eventually settled for Casa Cuba, a chain restaurant here which also has a range of traditional Maltese dishes on the menu. We went for a Maltese mezze to share - bread and crackers served with four dips, bigilla (a grey tasteless pâté which looked like sludge you'd get down the sink after a while), feta anchovy and olive dip (as hideous as it sounds), spicy bean dip (the best of them all, tasted a bit like a weak lime pickle) and artichoke and sundries tomato dip (meh). For our mains, we went different to what we normally do, eschewing the pizzas and burgers and opting for a beef salad in Wolfie's case and a local pasta dish - Rigatoni Ta' Manwel - in mine. This was comfortably the best pasta dish I've ever had, al dente pasta with a rich thick tomato sauce with added rosemary and local Maltese snausage. It was divine, so good I cannot even describe it, suffice to say that I had to employ two slices of bread just to mop up the sauce. After this, feeling full, we opted for a brief exploratory seaside stroll, checking out the dimmed view of Valletta on the other side of the bay through the masking sails of all the yachts before heading back to the hostel. We were going to check out confectionary bar again but there were a few rowdy people in there now so we gave it a miss.