1) The hotel breakfast room includes a small terrace with high walls, a retractable canvas roof, and the sweetest rustic pottery dishes in blues and greens. It was pleasant to enjoy a late morning plate (or two) of baked goods and fruit, and of course coffee.
The first cup of coffee is the best.
2) Because I still hadn’t figured out what to do with my day. Unhappy news from a friend at home made me choose to visit the cathedral of Gozo inside the Cittadella, the ancient fortress in Victoria, Gozo’s capitol. This involved taking the bus; well, one of the reasons I chose Malta was there public transportation, wasn’t it? A bus stop was just around the corner, and in about 20 minutes I was in Victoria.
3) Just as when I was trying to get to the Museo Sorolla in Madrid, I went in the exact opposite way Google Maps wanted me to go from the bus terminal to the Cittadella. But when you get to the top of a hill and you can actually see your destination in the distance . . . well, that’s a good indicator to change course.
3a) One benefit was the discovery of a series of mosaics depicting the Creation.
4) Streets (and sidewalks) are narrow all over Gozo, and Victoria suffers from a shortage of traffic lights. But eventually I blundered into the Cittadella Visitors Center. Their video presentation of Great Events in the History of the Cittadella featured the ancientness of the building by being shown in a rectangular stone room with arched panels in all the walls. The panels were used as movie screens for a continuous colonnade of pictures — 15th-century Sensurround! I would never have thought of that, and could just hear Mother saying “Different!'“
5) From there I stumped up a few flights of stairs (they grow ‘em big in Malta, too) and eventually found the cathedral. A round and pleasant lady took my money at the entrance to the sacristy and through there I entered the church. Only four or five other tourists were present, including one woman wearing a paper shawl; shoulders must be covered, so ladies without coverings of their own are provided with these paper shawls. With a subdued recording of a boys’ choir in the background, I was able to slip into the second pew and spend a few moments in prayer.
6) The church is just stuffed with art, more than many of the churches I saw in Spain — shucks, throughout my life! And to my surprise, quite a bit of it was installed in the last 30 years. The trompe-l’oeil painting in the dome over the altar is perhaps the most spectacular, but I was more interested in the polychrome tombs set into the floor, and the unusually tall and sparkling chandeliers. (Possibly they had just been cleaned for the Feast of the Assumption two weeks ago.)
A gruesome martyrdom in the Cathedral Museum.
7) Next up, the cathedral museum, which one friend might have described as the Housewares Department. One floor of some really elaborate silver (and a few gold) objects, one floor of paintings retired from active service, and various relics of the bishops of Gozo. The bishop’s landau, once used on great occasions, filled up a lot of the lobby.
8) And then, to the summit! Gozo seems to be made up of sweeping valleys divided by hills topped with ancient towers and/or limestone snowdrifts of townhouses. I got my photos, and was asked in halting Italian by a nice lady to take her photo, which I was happy to do.
9) The Gran Castello, one of the surviving residences inside the Cittadella, has been arranged to approximate life in a household of the 16th century (I think). Mother would have loved it, but at the moment I wasn’t that interested in local crafts of bygone days. The layout and the stairs were kind of fascinating — so many dead ends! And in one courtyard going down into the servants’ area of the dwelling, I got a hot blast of food cooking — which was not part of the museum exhibit, but a kitchen vent from the restaurant next door.
10) That, of course, led me to think of lunch, and I finally found at the top of a parapet a casual café covered by a flock of square white umbrellas branded with a popular cola logo in black, all persistently flapping in the stiff breeze. I found a table against a limestone wall, ordered a large bottle of water and the chicken kebabs, and settled in to read about the death of Edwina Mountbatten.
10a) We were quite high up, and Miss Agusta Wynde made me look up more than once to see if any of those umbrellas were going to escape to freedom. Most were secured in holes in the stone floor and packed in with wooden spikes, but one was weighed down by a large block of limestone on its base. Its shaft kept wanting to set sail, but it looked like the umbrella ropes had been tied in a way to tether it. Even so, before my lunch was over, the canopy of that umbrella was in shreds.
A graffitto of a ship scratched in by a prisoner.
11) The Old Prison included a lot of graffiti scratched into the limestone walls, and very stern signs not to scratch anything into the walls yourselves, or even touch them.
12) Catch a breeze wherever you can here, especially along the narrow outdoor corridors of the Cittadella. Heavenly!
13) Walking down the slippery stairs to the street, and looking at all the limestone buildings old and new, I thought Victoria both colorful and charming, but it could use a good tidy-up, a repointing, and a bit of paint here and there. That’s generally true of Marsalforn, too.
The view from my dinner table.
14) In the evening I dined at Il Gambero, the restaurant next door to the place I’d dined the night before, Il Kastell. Thursday is their barbecue night, so I ended up having chicken and garlic skewers with a gin and tonic. Quite delightful.
14a) I will clearly just be able to work my way down the bay, restaurant by restaurant.
15) It is so interesting being on this little crescent of restaurants, beach stores, and nooks and crannies. It always seems lively here!
The final panel in the Creation mosaic I stumbled upon in Victoria.