Malta - Day One - Part One

Dingli Cliffs, west coast of Malta

As we start our final descent into Luca Airport, we fly along the west coast of Malta.  Out the window I see what could easily pass for the White Cliffs of Dover.  I later learn those are the Dingli Cliffs (yes, that’s the actual name).  At 253 meters (830 ft), the highest point on the island.  Then we bank left over the unpronounceable Marsaxlokk Bay at the south end of the island, fly low over scrubland that looks surprisingly like the garrigue of Languedoc or the maquis of Corsica, and land in a small airport like the ones of my childhood.  (By the way, it's pronounced MAR-zeks-lock.)
       We’re allowed to walk across the tarmac and into the terminal.  I get no stamp in my passport - in fact no one even wants to see it.  The flight was from within the Schengen Area, so we’re all considered to be good to go, even though I was told to have my passport and my French resident’s card.  And there was I, expecting to have an exotic stamp to add to Machu Picchu and Easter Island, or the mammoth Russian visa.
       As I come out of the customs area, there’s a woman holding a card with my name.  My ride to town:  Josephine.  She drives me to the Grand Harbour Hotel, where a room with a sea view - well, a harbor view - awaits me.  I’m greeted by Mario, who will prove as helpful as he is cheerful throughout my stay.  This hotel is a friendly place, perhaps not chic in the Beverly Hills sense of the word but comfy and clean.  It’s a family enterprise, a dying breed in the hotel business.

View out over Fort San Angelo

Time to get out and see Valetta, given my limited time here.  Living in Montmartre proves good training, as each and every street goes either up or down, and sometimes both.  After all, the Knights chose the heights as protection from both invaders and pirates.  They even tried to level the top of this hill off, but soon struck hard rock - sunny-colored limestone - and gave up, making do with what little level space they had.
       So I head uphill and stumble upon a children’s show.  Today is the last day before Lent.  It’s Mardi Gras and all the children - and some adults - are already togged out in disguises. This show is in an area near the City Gate with what looks like a permanent stage of considerable size, not to mention some serious sound equipment.  (It turns out to be Royal Theater Square, an open-air theater on the site of the Royal Opera House, bombed by the Luftwaffe in World War II.  Those columns are all that’s left.)  Aside from me, the spectators seem all to be proud parents and other relatives who applaud and smile as the children run through dance numbers in their Disney costumes.  The number I see seems to be Beauty and the Beast, with Mickey and Minnie thrown in for good measure, and the two choreographers do the dance steps from below the stage, just in case someone forgets the routine.  What fun!

But this isn’t where I was headed.  As Josephine has highly suggested going to see the Hypogeum, my first order ot business is to buy a ticket. That can be done “across town” at the Museum of Fine Arts.  (I would have bet on the Archaeology Museum, but what do I know?)  As Valetta is a rocky promontory, that means going uphill.  And as everything in town was once something else, the Museum of Fine Arts was built as a private home, then used under the British as their Admiralty House and its inhabitants once included Lord Mountbatten when he was Admiral of the Fleet here.  Which all explains the majestic staircase.
       For 2€ more, above and beyond the Hypogeum entrance fee, I can visit the fine arts collection, and I’m already here - probably for the only time in my life - so why not?  It’s not a large collection, and the man behind the counter called it “Caravaggio-esque”, but there are also a few works by Ribera and one by Turner.  Two works caught my eye.  One is an Impressionist oil painting of an iceberg (can that be called a landscape?) by Albert Bierstadt, whom I’d never heard of.  When I looked him up, I found he was American and most of his works were grandiose depictions of the Far West, and all very unlike this sparse canvas. The other work is a contemporary piece simply called Landscape, by Mick Piro aka Mary de Piro, a Valetta-born artist.  And after only a few hours on the island, I can recognize it as being the sunny-colored limestone of Valetta itself.  Its sparse lines nonetheless depict the city as it rises into a blue sky.  These are both paintings that I could live with and enjoy at leisure, again and again.

The Museum of Archaeology is only three streets over and one street down, so that’s my next stop.  It, too, was something else before.  It was one of the eight original auberges of the Knights:  the Auberge de Provence.  Each auberge (a French word that means a house where you can sleep and eat) was named after one of the languages spoken, and this one evidently spoke provençal, the dialect from southern France.  By turning it into a museum, little is left of the original configuration, but the façade is grandiose, a 16th-century work of architectural art.

     Inside it’s a work in progress.  Probably this is the temporary exhibits area. But the permanent collection is an archaeologist’s dream!  There are relics going back to prehistoric times and a display that puts it all into chronological perspective.  For instance, Stonehenge was built in 2000 B.C., the Great Pyramid in 2530 B.C. but Malta’s Ggantua Temples a full thousand years earlier still, in 3600 B.C.!  There’s a sarcophagus with carved spirals in it of great beauty, and a stone with carved sheep, cattle and a boar as magnificent as anything I’ve seen anywhere.  There are small animal figurines and a statue of a full-bodied woman called the Venus of Malta.

      Other such statues have a hole where the head should be, indicating that perhaps there were different heads for different occasions; they also all have the same pose which no one can explain - the left arm folded across her stomach and the right arm against her side. There’s also a Sleeping Lady found in the Hypogeum, a very early artwork indeed.  A bowl lid alternates lions with grazing deer, all in graceful poses.  There were obviously artists of enormous talent and skill way back thousands of years ago on this small island.

(to be continued)

The island of Malta - Day Zero

My trip started half a day early.
       France has a motto:  Liberté - Egalité - Fraternité.  Right now the cabs and hotels are not feeling the Fraternité part.  Or the other two either.  Uber has cut deeply into the cab drivers’ profits and Air B&B into the hotels’.  The problem?  Neither of these interlopers has to pay all the fees, licenses, workers’ benefits, insurance, taxes, etc. that their establishment colleagues pay.  Which tips the playing field at least 50% out of level, and in favor of those interlopers.
       My obstacle - an apt choice of words - wasn’t going be to get to Malta, but merely to get to the airport!

   

        So I decided to take the RER B commuter train to Roissy-
Charles-de-Gaulle Airport the night before my flight.  Smack dab at its end is the Ibis Hotel, which has been there since Roissy opened its then-sole Terminal 1.  Now there’s also a Terminal 3 for charters and a Terminal 2, with its buildings A through G strung out like beads on a necklace.  And a free shuttle that runs between all three of the terminals every couple of minutes.

It’s a good thing I made that decision because the morning news, which I view from the spartan but clean comfort of the Ibis, shows footage of cabs totally blocking access to the airport.
       And yet here I am, sitting at a table overlooking the tarmac, sipping my tea and eating my pain au chocolat.  No foul, no harm, no stress.
       (A tip if you travel in Europe and you need an inexpensive light meal:  look for EXKI.  This chain shuns GMO, uses only organic foods, their pain au chocolat was deliciously crumb-ful and their tea (in those fabric bags) full-bodied.  Even their trays are “made of organic waste and paper, to reduce our ecological footprint”.  So... the food is good and you help save the planet.)

But why Malta, you wonder?  Yes, lots of people have asked me that.  Most people don’t know where it even is.  So let’s clear that up first.
       Malta is a tiny island south of Italy and east of Tunisia, only 112 miles from Sicily, which is a bit more than the distance between Cuba and Key West.  It covers 122 square miles and has a population of well under half a million.  For comparison’s sake, that’s a little less surface area than Detroit and about two-thirds of Detroit’s population.  Once upon a time, geologically speaking, it was part of a land bridge between Africa and Europe across what’s now the Mediterranean Sea.  I’ve always wondered how Lucy and her descendants got from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania to Europe because it’s a long detour if you go via the Middle East.  The existence of this land bridge would explain a lot.  And the island does have remnants of a Neanderthal civilization, as well as Stonehenge-worthy ruins.
       If you look into the history of Malta, there’s something for everyone.  You would find the Phoenicians, who traded throughout the entire Mediterranean Basin long before the Romans became a “world” power.  And when they did, Malta was there too, a pawn in the back-and-forth fighting of the Punic Wars, a name known to any Latin student.  For those interested in Christianity, there was St. Paul in chains, on his way to prison in Rome, washed up on Malta’s shores during a shipwreck.
       Skip a few generations and you’ll find Spain’s Ferdinand and Isabella, who sent Columbus to “find” America.  They took over Malta and bequeathed it to their grandson, Carlos V, king of Spain and ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.
       Then there were the pirates.  Lots and lots of pirates.  From the Barbary Coast.  Including the famous Barbarossa.  And other scalawags, such as the charlatan Cagliostro, who fled France over his part in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace involving Marie-Antoinette.  And finally, one of the greatest scalawags of them all:  Napoleon Bonaparte, who looted the island of anything worth looting... then lost it all when his ships were sunk by Britain’s Lord Nelson off the coast of Egypt.  Lord Nelson who was Vice-Admiral in Malta.
      The island became “the Nurse of the Mediterranean” during World War I, offering 25,000 beds to the wounded of “the Great War”.  And it held out during World War II, only a few miles  off Mussolini’s Italy yet never defeated, in spite of a total German blockade and more bombing than the London Blitz at its height.

       If you’re interested in literature, Malta can offer works written by Coleridge and Lord Byron and Thackeray and Sir Walter Scott during their visits to the island.
       If you’re interested in movies, there’s John Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon’.  You know, Humphrey Bogart as detective Sam Spade, searching for a vanished jewel-encrusted statue that the Knights Templar sent to Carlos V but was intercepted by the Barbary Pirates.  (See how it all fits together?)  The Maltese falcon actually did exist.  In 1530, when that same Emperor Carlos V handed over Malta to the Knights of St. John (not the Knights Templar), there was one condition.  Each year they were to send him one falcon in tribute.  The Maltese falcon.

     Yet most of all, for me, Malta is those knights:  the Knights of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.  Their original name - the Knights Hospitallers - says it all:  a community of monks founded to nurse Christians who fell ill while on pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Centuries ahead of their time, they boiled instruments before surgery.  But the Crusades meant they had to protect themselves as well, so they were also fierce warriors who fought Suleiman the Magnificent, the greatest warrior the Ottoman Empire ever had.  Knights, armor, banners flying... all those books I read in my childhood.
       So you see.  Something for everyone.  And down through the ages.