Day Six. 5/18/22. Valleta to Mdina

Greetings –

Took a walk this morning along some Valletta streets we had not yet visited, including the network of pedestrian streets; grabbed a bite to eat, and then headed to the garage at the bus depot to get the car to bring to the hotel to load our bags. Went pretty much without a hitch. Arrived back at the hotel at about 3:00 pm and headed out of town to Mdina (pronounced “emdina”). The route was fairly simple and we arrived at 3:30 pm. Everything is very close in Malta, given how small the island is. We could have easily stayed in Valletta and driven to Mdina as a short day trip, but we had decided it would be fun to stay in another town and be able to see it in both day and evening, and we are glad we did that. 

After checking into the Xara Palace—housed in a 17^th Century palazzo; 17 very spacious rooms—we took a walk through the fortified city of 300 residents (although it is contiguous with the city of Rabat which has more than 10,000 residents. Our room has a loft sleeping area that you access via a spiral staircase; given that we always seem to leave something on the wrong level, we are getting a lot of steps and flights into our exercise app. 

The hotel has only 17 rooms. We have what is referred to as a “street view”, but because of the floor we are on and the proximity of buildings within the fabric of the town surrounded by ramparts, we really look at a wall—albeit a very old and nice stone wall. There is a bronze plaque on the building that says “The Maltese nobility assembles within the walls of this ancient palazzo in order to elect its Committee of Privileges.”!!

Mdina sits on the tallest point of the island of Malta. It was founded in the 8^th Century and its total area is less than one kilometer…I said it was small. It was the original capital of Malta through the Middle Ages. It’s referred to by the Maltese as the “silent city”—which I assume refers to the fact that there are so few residents and so many churches and convents. I have no idea just how many churches and convents there are in this little village—but I’m pretty sure that we walked by at least 9 churches and convents.

Then we headed to dinner at the Michelin star restaurant called de Mondion which is conveniently located inside the hotel. We opted for the a la carte menu rather than the “tasting menu”—but there was a lot of tasting that they brought to the table as small starters, including a cracker like bite that had tiny caviar sprinkled about and perhaps some other goodie; a tiny cracker shaped like an ice cream cone but very very thin, inside of which was some kind of beef tartar and horseradish; a paper thin tomato that wrapped local goat cheese. Then something that looked like a small tomato arrived, but again the red tomato like covering was wrapping some kind of tuna and capers. Eventually we got to the actual meal: I began with amazing sweetbreads that came with tiny turnips and some kind of anchovy with sage and Mike went for the octopus that had some unagi and also some vegetables that were cut like linguini. For the main courses, I had the pigeon which had beetroot and some kind of truffle cream and a pepper sauce on the side. Mike had the beef fillet and I’m not certain what was with that dish. For dessert we shared a lemon yogurt souffle. But in addition, they brought tiny tastings of panna cotta and some other thing. We had a bottle of wine from Malta—we’ve been drinking local wine the whole time and the one we’ve settled on is called Marinisi (sp?)

By the time we finished dinner, you could have rolled us to the room. 

More tomorrow about Mdina as we will explore it more and possibly also Mosta which is nearby.

All the best-

Fern