Friendship on a small island - Part 1

Peter Elson of the Liverpool Daily Post compares Malta to an open air museum:

On A balmy summer evening in the small, but lively Maltese resort of St Julians, I wandered around the crowded streets, filled with many locals and holidaymakers, all out to enjoy themselves. The throng was drawn towards music wafting through the hot night air and soon I stood on the rim of a spacious open-air dance floor.

Maltese of all ages and both sexes had come dancing to the strains of Blame It On The Bossa Nova and La Vida Loca. Strictly speaking, standards varied, but the enthusiasm was indisputable. The friendliness I encountered at the dance on this Mediterranean island, set between southern Europe and north Africa, set the welcoming tone for my visit.

Long-drawn together through shared history during the British Empire, these two great seafaring island nations of Malta and Great Britain remain affectionately close, in spite of a somewhat painful parting after independence in 1964. Described as one big open-air museum, the Maltese islands’ fascinating past is visible today. Malta and its islands of Gozo and Comino chart some 7,000 years of history.

Almost every vista is closed by a handsome (and usually large) baroque, domed church in the island’s ubiquitous and attractive buff-coloured limestone. Situated at the Mediterranean’s crossroads, Malta was successively colonised by the top dogs: Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Romans (when St Paul was shipwrecked here in AD60). Later Arabs introduced citrus fruits, cotton and irrigation systems.

Arabs and British bequeathed ornamental gardens to relieve the island’s aridity. Both races also contributed courtyard buildings and fine neo-classical properties, adding to heritage like Valletta’s 1732 Manoel Theatre. Valletta dates from 1530, when the island became home to the military-religious Order of St John, dubbed the Knights of Malta. The Knights created the fabulous fortified city on Malta’s magnificent natural harbour, named after their Grand Master Jean de la Valette...