Mdina and the Dingli Cliffs on Malta (30/9)

Malta is small.  That is Valetta in the distance
photographed from the walls of Mdina

It was off to Mdina today which is pretty well in the middle of the island. Mdina has a very long prehistory and history, and it is thought to have had its first fortifications built by the Phonecians around 700BC. They chose this inland site to protect themselves from invasion. Then came the Punics, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Arabs, Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, the Order of St John, French, British, and finally independence. They were also constantly raided by the corsairs from the Barbary Coast who were after slaves for the Ottoman slave trade. Life was not easy for a native Maltese.

The gateway to Mdina

Mdina is still surrounded by defensive walls which were built by the Arabs in the 800's, who chose not only to build huge walls, but also dug a deep moat around the city. Most of the buildings survived the 1693 earthquake except the cathedral, which was enlarged and rebuilt. There are still many fine 15th and 16th century buildings in the city because many of the noble families chose to stay on in Mdina instead of moving down into Valletta after the Order of St. John had established that city. It is known as the silent city because there is a restriction on motor traffic in the city. It was a pleasure to walk around the narrow streets and have only pedestrian traffic to avoid. There wasn't a piece of litter in sight either. Malta is so clean after Sicily. The streets are narrow and the buildings are constructed out of a honey-coloured local stone, so the whole city takes on a very yellow hue. It was quite lovely. 

Some of the tesserae in the mosaic
in Rabat were tiny.  Jill's finger for scale.

As a city, Mdina is very small, so it didn't take long to walk around it. The main population of Mdina lives outside its walls in Rabat. It was the Arabs who divided the city into two, the walled city and that outside the walls. In Rabat, we went to see another Roman house, not expecting anything out of the ordinary after our visit to the villa des Casales in Sicily, but were pleasantly surprised. This house contained mosaics as well, not as vast as at Casales, but the workmanship was as good if not better. The tesserae used were smaller, you could fit four on a fingernail. The artist would have had to use forceps to place them into position, or he had very small fingers. There was also one mosaic which had a design which we call tumbling blocks in patchwork. This is a 3-D design using diamond shapes to create a cube. It was laid out in white, grey and black marble and looked very good. Surrounding this design was a wave border of very small tesserae. In another display which was about the mosaics in the house, there were three other designs which we have used in patchwork, the diamond lozenge like Jill's Jane Austin quilt, the hexagon, and the six diamond star which is in her Ring of Roses quilt. Nothing is new. The remains of the house are totally enclosed in a building, so they are well looked after.

The Dingli cliffs are very high
for such as small island.

From Mdina we caught a bus down to the Dingli Cliffs, which were quite impressive, and started walking along the coast with the ultimate goal of reaching two Neolithic temple complexes. We had picked up the routes of several walks at Tourist Information, and this was one of them. Unfortunately we didn't have time to do it in its entirety, but it did give us a feeling for the Maltese countryside. It took us past several small chapels and a Bronze Age village, although it was difficult to work out what was bronze age construction and what was the more recent farming practice of drystone walling. At present the countryside it is baked dry, it is autumn, and it doesn't really look very productive. The fields are small and are hand-worked. Tractors would be too big to use to plough the fields. On our way back into Valletta we did see one field being turned over by back-hoe! I suspect the field may have lain fallow for a few years, and this was the best way to turn it over. Even back at the time of the establishment of the Order of St John on Malta, it had to import fresh produce on a daily basis, and this is definitely the case today. One thing that isn't prominent in the landscape are olive trees. Apparently the Arabs took most of them out in preference to growing and processing cotton, and this was a major industry for Malta up until the mid 19th century. It's economy would have suffered greatly with the industrialisation of the cotton industry. It was getting late so we decided to walk into Siggiewi and catch the bus back to Valetta from there and then back home. We were home too late to cook for ourselves so it was back down to the waterfront for dinner (at a different restaurant). Even at 9.30pm one can walk into a restaurant and order a meal. We were by no means the last. People were still walking in as we were walking out.