Silent City

Feeling more adventurous with a good 24 hours since the last sign of food poisoning had passed, I hopped a bus once again to the center of the island, the twin cities of Rabat and Mdina. Mdina apparently means "walled city," and it is the inner section, the old fortress from which the many revolving empires established dominion over the island. It is called the silent city because the paved streets are too narrow to accommodate cars, and the white noise of Rabat's traffic is dampened by the thick old fortified walls. And it is quiet, at least off the few main streets where groups of tourists by the dozen gawk at ancient sites while a tour guide speaks in any number of languages that tourists come in. I thought about hanging back behind one of these crowds to hear some of the stories, but I didn't find any in English and I didn't think I'd get much out of listening in on French or German.

The walls of Mdina are made from stone cut straight from the island - a place old and intact enough to remember times when human-built edifices melded almost seemlessly to the landscape, made out of the same brick and mortar as the rocky island itself. It possesses a Mediterranean aesthetic that, if you just saw pictures, you might mistake for postcards of anything from the Greek islands to Algeria to Italy. This is the territory where Africa and the Middle East and Europe come together, around a sea that gave birth to some of the earliest far-flung sailors on the planet, skirted by the lands where civilization first rose up.

Outside the walls I crossed into the new city, Rabat, where the streets are only slightly less narrow and harrowing than the old town. I walked toward the cluster of churches and catacombs and other monuments hidden in the jumble of streets, and stopped into the church of Saint Paul, where a gated basement chamber marks the cave where Saint Paul gave a legendary sermon in his brief stopover on Malta. Nearby are two sets of catacombs, though I didn't go into either one. A few years ago I visited the catacombs under Paris and decided that unless there was some pressing reason to do so, I didn't really need to climb down into the crust of the planet to see tightly claustrophobic chambers full of dead human bones again. The crypt of Saint Agatha is rumored to be covered with centuries-old frescoes which were nevertheless painted years several dozen decades after Agatha herself hid out in the catacombs away from a rich nobleman who eventually found her and expedited her path to sainthood, so to speak.

But I was getting hungry, so I headed back toward Mdina where I'd seen a couple of cafes. Somehow, just a block from the main square where I had exited the bus a couple hours earlier, I managed to turn right when I should've turned left, and spent the next hour wondering how exactly one can get lost in a tiny city on a small island - especially when said city perches on top a hill from which one can see, well, most the rest of the country. But lost I was, and in the noon heat I realized that I probably should take a little care not to get caught out away from known territory with no sunscreen, no snacks, and not enough water to keep myself hydrated after the recent adventure in food poisoning that I was still recovering from. I finally went back to exactly where I'd started from, and noticed that the entrance gate to Mdina was no less than about a hundred yards in the opposite direction.

I went back into the old city and checked out a couple of cafes, but by then the lunch hour had arrived and the shaded little terrace restaurant I had my eye on was so crowded that it appeared that there wasn't enough wait staff to even seat people. So I found a quieter place and eventually got some food and enough energy to walk back to the bus station and make my way back to Qawra, where I promptly took a nap. As the sun started to set I went for a long walk around the peninsula, and got dinner on the far side at a place that probably had the best fresh pasta I've had in years, despite the sign outside that said "Extremely Casual Dining!" I guess that's their selling point. I went back to the hotel and - not being able to find any episodes of Law & Order, even in Italian - worked a little more on my thesis and then collapsed into bed.