Calypso’s Embrace

Malta: Population over 500,000.  Malta: Registered vehicles, over 400,000.  So a reason not to rent a car.  We booked a taxi to take us from Mdina to the south of the island for the car ferry to Gozo, to board the ferry, then drive us into Victoria and drop us at our hotel.  It was expensive but the convenience factor was invaluable.

The ferry was a trip and a half.  Four ferries running the Malta/Gozo route, one every 15 minutes, each taking 140 cars on two ramps, a top ramp on hydraulics, and just three staff on the ground directing traffic to board.  Maybe if Nicolas Jimenez had witnessed the efficiency of ferries in Malta he’d still have his job as CEO at BCF.

The weather today was between 22C and 25C.  It was sunny, between 22C and 25C.  It was partly cloudy, between 22C and 25C.  And there were a couple of short rain showers, when it was between 22C and 25C.

We are staying in Victoria, renamed for the British queen, but Rabat to locals.  Like Gozo, joy in Spanish from the Aragonese, but Ghawdex to some locals from the Phoenicians calling it Gaulos.  And like Odysseus, here for seven years in the arms of Calypso on fictional Ogygia “largely identified as Gozo.”  Lewis Carroll couldn’t have made it more confusing.  It’s like that movie Duplicity:

Julia Roberts: I found these in your closet

Clive Owen: I have no idea who they belong to.

Julia Roberts: In that case I’ll put them back on.

We arrived at our hotel slightly early, so took coffee downstairs then checked-in just past two.  We’d shared the cost of a basic room but moneybags had secretly upgraded us to a spectacular room with a roof deck, jacuzzi hot tub, a shower that doubles as a hammam, and a sauna.  There was a bottle of prosecco on ice waiting for us upon arrival.  Words like swank, score and debonair came to mind but then I realized those were all girly magazines in the 60s and not the sort of words to describe our digs at all which is swank and score and the type of room where, in Duplicity, Julia Roberts seduces Clive Owen, drugs him, and ransacks his hotel room.

We wandered around Victoria and, as with any and all tourists, ended up at the Cittadella, the fortress from which you can see pretty much the entire island if you climb up the ramparts.

Within the complex we stopped into the cathedral, the prison and the museum attached to the visitor’s centre.

The Gozo Cathedral dates from the 1690s.  In keeping with the theme here of many identities, there was, first, a Roman temple, then a Byzantine structure (535 CE), then an Arabic mosque (870 CE), then transformed back to a church by the Normans (1127 CE), then built “more grandly” in the 17^th century as it stands today.

The prison is nothing more than a courtyard and a few cells and not worth the price of admission.  Except we were the only tourists inside, and there was a guide on staff (perhaps on the spectrum or just Jeopardy smart) who cottoned onto us and gave us the most spectacular tour.  He explained how the Knights of Malta changed the building code to make every building capture water, how the prison system for the Knights was separate and distinct from the justice system for the general populace, how prisoners’ graffiti often reflected their background as sailors, how 1799 was a critical year (Napoleon invaded) and the British and Maltese rebelled against them, how the language of Malta through the 1840s was Italian, he explained how the justice system was codified in 1784 so that civil, municipal and criminal laws were all under one law and, wait for it, he showed us on his phone how at auction he had bought an original version of the 1784 laws (!).  And he told us much more; that he was born in Toronto to Maltese parents, had a specialty in maritime history, that the French held out for five years before surrendering, he knew the what the eight points of the Maltese cross stood for, and that the lovely ochre tint to all the limestone which characterizes Malta was, in the end, a bit monotonous.  It was sensational; I write that without a droplet of irony.  If only all tourist tours were that interesting.  And we were basically just touring a hallway.

 

After our mini culture crawl we headed back to the spa penthouse where I took a jacuzzi and sauna, then we had a casual dinner nearby, then I took a deeply relaxing hammam (which, on a side note, was reminiscent of the steam room Doug installed at his home in Toronto), then we called it a night.