Day Seven. 5/19/22. Mdina, Mosta, and Rabat

June 10, 2025

Today, we walked practically every street in Mdina, the wonderful original capital of Malta until the seafaring Knights arrived in the 1530s and sidelined the “city.” But it exists almost as if time stood still… bustling with tourists and school children on class trips by day and totally silent at night when only the 300 residents and about 40 guests at the hotel and some small inns remain (us among them). We visited the Domus Romana, which had been a Roman villa around 100 BC and over centuries others built on top of it and the remains were finally discovered in the late 1800s. A tiled central courtyard was found and during WWII several feet of sand were poured on top of that floor to protect it. We also stopped into a few churches, and lunched in a lovely courtyard. Then we drove out of Mdina to Mosta to see the Mosta Dome—a gigantic dome (used to be the third largest dome in all of Europe but is now the fourth largest because a newer and supposedly bigger dome was built in Gozo in the 1970s. Still the people of Mosta believe their dome is bigger if you measure the width rather than the height. Either way….. the Mosta Dome is visible from much of the island.

We really just wanted to see the inside space of the dome which is a parish church, but when we arrived we had to follow the course prescribed at the ticket stand. So we started by walking down some rather precarious uneven concrete stairs that led to the bomb shelter about 15’ under the plaza where many Maltese hid during WWII. Then we emerged back up…at the other side of the plaza and began the trek up 74 steep spiral stairs (again pretty uneven) to reach the balcony at the rim of the dome. From there we could see the inside of the church and also see the dome up close. And then it was down another set of 74 spiral steps to get into the actual church space.

Also, as the story goes (most of it factual), on April 9, 1942 about 300 people gathered for Mass, when a German bomb hit the Mosta Dome. The bomb sank to the floor and somehow never exploded. The Maltese have interpreted this to be a miracle. There is a replica of the bomb in the lobby of the church, along with photographs of the church during WWII.

Malta is definitely not a country for people with disabilities or those having difficulty walking. Indeed, in the whole week we really never saw anyone in a wheelchair. Then again, you do see a lot of elderly people, some with canes. Not sure how they really get around.

And continuing my quest to know who is living in Malta, I’ve now questioned all service people we have encountered (waiters, hotel reception folks, bartenders, taxi drivers, car rental folks, shopkeepers, etc.) and thus far we’ve met (mostly young people) from India, Italy, France, Australia, Spain, Philippines, Africa (unclear where); many came during Covid and several had interesting stories about their route. One Indian waiter (who holds an MBA) had left India in 2019 to do graduate work in Europe and then had to leave during Covid—initially he went to Portugal and then to UAE and then to Malta. He’s from Delhi, but finding Malta (especially Mdina) peaceful and wonderful. The manager of the restaurant we ate at last night was from Malta, but 12 years ago decided to move to the US (NY in fact) and says in retrospect “What was I thinking coming from this little island and going to such a busy place… but he said for three years he learned that he could get anything he wanted at any time of the night; everything was always open. From NY (he lived in Kips Bay) he went to Chicago, took a train across the US to Los Angeles via Colorado and New Mexico, and eventually took a job with an airline in Abu Dhabi for five years… met his wife who is Japanese and studied in Boston.. and returned to Malta to raise a family. His kids are fluent in Japanese!

He told us that there are a lot of Maltese that go to the US as many have relatives who fled Malta after WWII because conditions were so bad. And there are Maltese who live in the states for a few years and eventually return because they miss their own country. A group of them gather every July 4^th at a plaza and have a 4^th of July barbecue and sing American songs and talk about their times in the US.

We drove back to Mdina and then headed to dinner at Root 81, which is named after an old bus route. It’s situated on the stairs leading from the edge of Mdina to Rabat. It’s about an 8-minute walk…or at least that’s what it should be. But there was a lot of construction going on and the path and the stairs were closed. We wound up walking on a major road, in the dark (not helped by my very NY travel wardrobe which is almost all black). There aren’t any real shoulders on the roads here and definitely no sidewalks on the edge of major roads. Then we reached the stairs and they were still under construction, so we climbed very uneven concrete. But I lived to tell the story. After a nice dinner, we walked back along the major roadway which definitely was not laid out for pedestrians. And we spent our last night at the lovely Xara (pronounced “charra”) Palace in the “silent city.”