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)