History Lives on Malta

When you go in a European cathedral, your eyes are almost always drawn up. Here, look at the floor first.

In the oratory of St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Caravaggio painted the only canvas he ever signed. The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. The name is not in a corner. It is in the blood running from the Baptist’s neck: f. Michelang.o — Brother Michelangelo. He had just been made a knight. He wrote himself into the patron saint’s death.

We had one day. You need a week. I normally use all my own pictures for my site, but some of these shots I didn’t take are going to paint the picture words cannot, I will denote the difference.

Viking called the port Valletta. The excursion we took was Knights of Malta.

The Order with the long name

Their full title is a paragraph: the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta. People shorten it to the Knights of Malta, or the Hospitallers, or the Knights of St. John. All of those are the same men, moving west as the eastern Mediterranean got too hot: Jerusalem, then Rhodes, then this rock in 1530 when Charles V handed it over for the rent of one Maltese falcon a year.

They were not tourists. They were a hospital that learned to fight. They built Valletta after the thing that almost ended them.

1565

Suleiman sent a fleet. The Great Siege lasted about four months. Jean Parisot de Valette held the forts. The Turks took Fort St. Elmo the hard way and still could not have the rest of the harbor. When it was over, Valette put a new city on the limestone and named it after himself. You walk those streets on a ship day and you are walking a grid designed so cannon could sweep it. Mel Gibson is going to make a movie about it. Soon.

That is the story the island tells first. It is not the only one.

Caravaggio, knighted and thrown out

He came as a fugitive. He had killed a man in Rome. Malta offered a knighthood and, he hoped, a path back to a pardon. Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt took him in. In July 1608 they invested him. He painted the Beheading for the oratory, and Saint Jerome Writing, and a portrait of Wignacourt that now lives in the Louvre.

Five weeks later he wrecked it. A brawl in Valletta. A senior knight, Giovanni Rodomonte Roero, wounded. Caravaggio went into the rock-cut cell at Fort St. Angelo — the same fort that had held in 1565. In October he went over the wall and off the island. The Grand Master was none too pleased.

On 1 December 1608 the Order assembled in front of the painting he had just finished and expelled him in absentia. The Latin is the part people remember: tanquam membrum putridum et foetidum — a putrid and fetid member. They defrocked him under his own signature in blood.

The picture stayed. Go see it.

Paul and John

Paul landed on Malta. Yes that Paul. Around A.D. 60 the ship bound for Rome broke up on these rocks. Acts says the islanders were kind. Paul wintered here, healed, preached. Maltese Christianity dates itself from that wreck. The grotto and the feast days are Paul’s.

John the Baptist is why the cathedral looks the way it does. He is the Order’s patron. His martyrdom is the altarpiece. His name is in the Order’s name. The culture is both: an apostolic shipwreck and a military brotherhood that prayed to the man whose head ended on a platter. You feel that double inheritance in Valletta more than in most European capitals. The stones are Hospitaller. The parish memory is Pauline. The painting on the wall is the Baptist dying. Gaze at it and try to keep a dry eye.

A knight in the room, and the floor

We sat for a talk by a real Knight of Malta. Not a reenactor. He told us why they asked him to join. He was the man who translated the tombs on the floor. I didn’t get any Great Siege stories out of him, but he outlined their charitable hospitals around the globe. Doing the good work.

St. John’s is paved with knights. Marble inlay, coats of arms, Latin, skulls, the whole argument of a life reduced to a slab you walk across because there is no other way to the oratory. He read them. I have the photograph, it’s my iPhone screensaver.

The Order is not a costume shop (check the pics I took). It still exists. It is still a mouthful.

The bomb that did not go off

Skip forward to 9 April 1942. Malta is being pounded, and not in a good way. Churchill called it the most bombed place on earth in that stretch of the war. The whole island later received the George Cross.

In Mosta, during a service, a 500-kilogram German bomb came through the dome of the Rotunda and hit the floor among hundreds of people. It did not explode. They still call it Il-Miraklu tal-Bomba. A replica sits in the church so you can see the size of the thing that should have ended the room.

Malta’s history on repeat: hold, rebuild, tell the story in the building that survived.

Three islands

Malta is Valletta, the Three Cities across the Grand Harbour, Mdina inland, Mosta, the film forts, the density.

Gozo is the quieter sister — temples older than the pyramids’ reputation, the Azure Window that Game of Thrones used and the sea took back in 2017.

Comino is the blue lagoon in the middle, a pause between ferries. You’ll recognize it in pics.

A port day is Valletta and maybe Mdina if the coach is kind. Gozo is a second day. The harbors want a third. That is why a week is the honest ask.

You have seen this place on a screen

Malta has been working as other places for decades.

• Gladiator and Gladiator II — Fort Ricasoli as Rome, still can’t believe that sequel (opinions vary, but even Denzel couldn’t save it)

• Troy (Pitt at his peak, don’t be a hater)

• Game of Thrones, season one — Mdina as King’s Landing; the vanished Azure Window as a Dothraki wedding

• Popeye — they left the village standing at Anchor Bay

• World War Z, Captain Phillips, Munich, Jurassic World: Dominion, Napoleon

• Bond - https://timesofmalta.com/article/Skyfall-shakes-and-stirs-Malta-in-2012.453379

The limestone takes paint and armor better than almost any shoreline in Europe. After the cathedral, it is almost comic how many fake worlds used the same streets.

Watch this before you book the week

There is a short documentary on Prime call Hidden Malta. Incredibly beautiful and informative, it will give you inspiration for a longer stay. Malta has the world’s oldest record store, or at least they say. Either way, I watched the doc before the visit so it was a quick - must visit and buy a shirt. Gave it to my daughter. She had round me a cool record store shirt when she moved to Colorado, so it was a cool “a Lannister always pays his debts” moment. Checkmate kid.

What I would do with seven days, not one

• Can’t Miss: St. John’s, the oratory, the floor, the Beheading. Do not rush the blood signature, then the Grand Harbour from the other side

• Vittoriosa, Fort St. Angelo, the prison wall he went over.

• A morning in Mdina.

• Mosta and the bomb.

• A day on Gozo, pretty clear blue water and hiking to the Tal-Mixta Cave.

• One empty of tourists late afternoon in Valletta to just explore.

We did the compressed version and it worked. It also left a list. Malta is not a stop. It is a small country that has been the middle of someone else’s war for three thousand years and kept the buildings.

If you are on a Viking Med itinerary that lists Valletta for a day, take the Knights tour or boat around the island if the weather is good. Then decide whether you need to come back without a ship clock. I already know the answer.

— J Christopher Williams, Founder & Travel Advisor, The Wandering X

Brilliant, chaotic, incorrigible (too soft?), fatalistic one time brother of the Knights of St. John, Caravaggio just couldn’t stay out of trouble. Tortured genius I guess? I took this on our one short day on Malta. Off season, so got to stand there by myself for a few seconds, just incredible.