Charm and convenience

Isolated Malta offers travelers charm and convenience, writes Shelley Emling in The Miami Herald:

No one would have mistaken us for crazy-in-love honeymooners, but at least we could pretend we were during our one weekend a year away from the kids. I was in Malta, a Mediterranean island south of Sicily, with my husband to celebrate our 17th wedding anniversary. At home in London were our three children, ages 7, 9, and 12.

Many Americans may know Malta as the place where U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met before heading off to Yalta for their summit with Soviet leader Josef Stalin.More recently, it was the place where Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last November.

And if it was good enough for the queen and her husband, it was good enough for me. In the end, this spit of land between Italy and North Africa was much more than good enough. As well as boasting warm weather virtually year-round, this former British colony stands out from other Mediterranean islands in the sheer number of cultural and especially historical monuments it has crammed into such a small space..

We started our own visit to Malta with a walk through the fortified capital city of Valletta, a gorgeous honey-colored site that Hollywood has embraced as a backdrop for a number of films. It doubled as Rome in the movie Gladiator, and Brad Pitt prancing around the streets for weeks in a leather skirt while making Troy..

But the high point of our weekend came not in Valletta but in Mdina, once the island's capital and now known as the Silent City, which we reached by bus. Eerily quiet, each of the small city's tiny alleyways - walled in by the Arabs - meander in such a way that it's impossible to tell what's around the corner...