Juliet Rix - the go-to voice on Malta - shares her fascination for this small Mediterranean island nation to the south of Sicily. From prehistoric tombs to monumental cathedrals - Malta's story is one of conquest and defence. It has emerged as a wonderfully enriching destination to visit... plus it's rather beautifully sunny too.

Welcome back to Destination Unlocked with me, Daniel Egg, just now ready to depart.

Please make sure your seat belt is my fast and do make yourself comfortable.

Hi, welcome back to Destination Unlocked.

Where this week we are in the Mediterranean in a place where, let me tell you, the last time I visited it was 47 degrees Celsius.

I don't think I've ever been so hot.

It is an amazing place, but my goodness, it gets hot in the summer.

But maybe there are other times of year to visit.

We're going to Malta.

We're going to be visiting Valletta and also discussing some of the other areas around this small island country in the middle of the Mediterranean, just south of Sicily.

And we're doing it in excellent company.

Today we're joined by Juliet Ricks, who is.

Well, she's Britain's go to when it comes to Malta.

She's the author of the Brat Guide to Malta and Gozo, and she's written extensively about the country for many, many of our big national newspapers and publications.

So I'm sure you're going to really enjoy this very insightful conversation.

Juliet, where are you unlocking for us today?

Malta.

And of course, Malta actually has three islands and really confusingly, the main island is called Malta.

Malta.

Malta.

So good.

They named it twice.

Exactly.

And then there's Gozo, smaller and in between tiny little Camino.

And the main island of Malta is the one where the international airport is.

Exactly.

And the wonderful thing about Malta is it's so small that actually you can reach everything really, really easily from the airport.

Even if you want to go across to Gozo, it doesn't take very long.

And I think with Malta, there are specific places that most people want to hit.

On the main island, you've got Valletta.

Yes.

And you've got Medina.

It would be odd to make a trip to Malta and not to cover both of those.

Oh, definitely.

They are only a 20 minute drive apart, so it would be crazy.

It would take you less time than getting into Central Lond, your average hotel.

So, yes, definitely Valletta.

There's loads of stuff packed into it.

It's a wonderful place to wander around and there's plenty to do.

But it is only a kilometer long by about 600, 700 meters wide.

So you're not going to spend your entire week in less than 1 square kilometer.

You definitely want to be exploring the whole island and in my opinion, also Gozo.

Would you say that Valletta is the densest capital in Europe?

Possibly.

Malta, probably.

Excepting Vatican City probably has the densest concentration of historic sites of any country because it is quite concentrated and it's got this extraordinary history where everybody who wanted to either trade or invade in the Mediterranean wanted Malta, because it has this fabulous, huge, deep, safe harbor right in the middle of the Mediterranean.

So if you're doing anything in the Mediterranean, you want that place, which means it's gone through everybody from the Phoenicians to the Carthaginians, the Romans, through the Arabs, the medieval Christian Europeans, the Knights of St. John, who had it for more than two centuries.

And of course, in the middle there, the Ottoman Turks tried very hard to take it from the Knights.

And.

And the Great Siege is quite an important part of Malta's history all the way through.

The desire for that Grand Harbour has shaped the history of the place.

And there have been all these different influences coming in that have left their mark on the food, the language, the culture.

Nowadays, if you visit Malta, you see that history sort of laid out in front of you architecturally, and it looks incredible.

It's very inspiring.

And you could be walking between these places with a gelato in hand.

It feels very relaxed and.

And peaceful.

And the history of Malta sounds like it's anything but.

It is very peaceful to walk around now.

It is quite relaxed.

It is Mediterranean.

The sun does shine 300 days of the year, and it glows off the limestone facades in the streets and there's sparkling blue water everywhere.

You really do need sunglasses when the sun's shining in town, even in the winter.

But, yes, if you go back to the history, there was quite a lot of conflict, probably not that much more than other places have seen.

And then the British and the Maltese together, together kicked out Napoleon and then the British took over.

But the Great Siege is a really important part of Maltese history, and it took place around the grand harbor, and it was the Ottoman Turks trying to take this crucial Maltese island so that they could do their trading and invading across between Europe, the Levant and North Africa.

And they only just failed to take Malta.

The result of the Great Siege was that the Knights built Valletta the citadel capital of Malta, which is a UNESCO World Heritage city, was a barren, rocky peninsula at the time of the great siege.

And it was only after the siege, when the knights realized that if they were going to stay, they had to refortify in a big way, that they built Valletta from scratch.

It's on a peninsula, it's surrounded by bastion walls and sea, only with a narrow landward side, it can't really expand.

And in a way, that's been its good luck, because it's remained this wonderful gem of a city that is still fundamentally the night city, although there's actually some statement modern architecture in there too, particularly the new parliament building, which was designed by starchitect Renzo Piano, who did the London Shard and earlier in his career, the Pommedu Centre in Paris.

And he's very, very good at creating something that's very 21st century, but does take into account its local context.

I personally think it's a great success.

When Italy came into the war, it started bombing Malta.

The Maltese were deeply shocked by that, because it's a Catholic country in the Mediterranean.

It had always been very closely connected to Sicily, and many people in Malta didn't believe that the Italians would bomb them, and they did.

And that brought Malta more firmly on side with the Allies and into the war.

And Malta was quite central to the Mediterranean, Mediterranean campaign.

The invasion of Sicily was planned by Eisenhower down in a tunnel underneath Valletta, which is still there, and you can visit it.

So there's quite a lot of World War II history as well.

And that moment changed the flag.

It was that significant.

That's right, because Malta was awarded the George Cross, Britain's highest civilian honour, but that's the only time it's been awarded to an entire population.

It wasn't awarded to one person or a few people, it was awarded to the entire population of Malta.

It was a reward for holding out, but it was also to encourage continued holding out, because it was given at the worst time in the war, when Malta was being bombed more than anywhere else.

So this was very much a way of trying to help lift morale.

And it actually did.

It did help, and there is still pride in the awarding of that medal.

There are a few sort of nationalists who say this shouldn't be on the flag.

It's a colonial symbol, but the vast majority of people in Malta want it there, and it's still there.

When we talk about colonial Malta and independent Malta, the concept of an independent Malta is a very modern thing.

For the vast majority of the island's inhabited history, it has been part of empires of one ilk or another as.

Far back as written history.

Yes.

What's really fascinating about Malta is also, if you go back before written history to pre history, Malta actually has, and hardly anyone knows about these, some of the oldest stone architecture in the world, the Maltese temples, are older than the standing stones at Stonehenge.

They're older than the Great Pyramid.

And they're also, in a sense, more sophisticated, in the sense that they're real buildings.

They're buildings where you walk in through a monumental doorway.

They have towering facades.

You go in to a sort of central walkway with curved rooms on either side.

There's carved furniture, for want of a better term.

Altars, they're usually called.

They're known as temples.

We don't obviously know exactly how they were used, but there's enough evidence to think that they probably had a practical and a ritual element.

I like to think of them as a bit like today's parish churches, of which there are a lot in Malta.

They'll tell you there's one for every day of the year.

It's very nearly true.

They were clearly community buildings.

They're big.

They took a lot of people to create them.

These were not built by one person, they weren't private.

And they're fascinating.

These buildings go back more than 5,000 years.

Where would you find these if you're looking to visit them?

I would start at Nidra and Hajaim on the south coast of Malta, where there are two temple complexes, Nigera and Hajaim.

And they are in a setting that has changed least since they were built.

They're in a rural context on the south coast.

I would also go to the National Archaeological Museum in Valletta, where you find the original carvings and carved stones, patterned stones from the temples, including some wonderful figures who I still use the old term for.

We've always called them Malta's fat ladies.

And they are completely wonderful.

I now get told I should call them other things, but nobody's come up with a decent alternative.

Somebody said you should call them obese persons.

And I thought, no, I don't think that's better.

So the fat ladies, they're fantastic.

They've got these sort of huge hips, large thighs, tiny little feet, delicate, beautifully carved hands, often Heads often separate from the body, but when you find them with headdresses and delicate hair, they're fantastic figures.

And they've been found at several of the temple sites.

And these are carvings made again 5,000 years ago.

There's obviously an iconography here.

They're not natural women.

These are something representative perhaps of plenty.

If you're a farming community on a small island that's a bit dry.

Plenty is an important concept.

You want a good harvest, you want a sense of plenty.

And these larger people perhaps symbolize plenty, but that's me.

That's not a documented fact.

They're wonderful things to see.

There's a particularly beautiful small one called the Sleeping lady, which was actually found not in one of the above ground temples, but in the Palsatheleni Hypogeum, which is an extraordinary site.

It goes down 12 meters underground, cut into the rock, three layers and it's a tomb complex from the temple period.

So they had temples for the living above ground and then they buried their dead in rock cut tombs underground.

And you can visit the Hypogeum, it's a UNESCO World Heritage site.

And it's fascinating.

The beautiful little Sleeping lady, who's a few inches long and is not made of stone.

This one is made of clay and she's lovely lying on a sort of couch.

So they had furniture as well.

People think of the Stone Age as being uncivilized.

No, wrong, it wasn't.

These were consummate craftspeople living in an organised society.

They just happened not to have metal or writing or the wheel.

And they managed to build these temples of blocks of stone, up to 20 tons in weight, without any of those things.

That's pretty skilled.

It's amazing.

And your point about the fat ladies being reflective of having plenty makes total sense in the same way as the Tudors wanted to be fat monarchs, because it showed how well they were doing.

But it also speaks to why the Ottoman Turks thought that their attempted siege was going to be so successful centuries later.

Because it's very easy in theory to besiege an island nation that can't grow enough food.

Well, indeed, the Ottomans really did think that this wasn't going to be particularly hard, although they must have known it wasn't going to be that easy because they sent quite an armada.

They weren't taking any chances, or at least they thought they weren't taking any chances.

They.

Part of the problem was that there was a bit of an argument between the head of the army and the head of the Admiralty of The ships.

It was a really small, relatively new fort, and they thought, we'll take that, that's easy.

It's all on its own on this barren peninsula.

And then we'll be able to put all our troops on here, we'll be able to put our ships in the harbour the other side of that peninsula, and we'll be able to attack across the Grand Harbour to take Birgu and the area the other side of the Grand Harbour from the Knights.

That was their main base at the time, what is now called the Three Cities on the far side of the Grand Harbour from Valletta.

But they hadn't bargained for just how determined the knights were to hold on to Fort St Elmo and how much they would put into it, because the knights were desperate to hold on to Malta.

They'd already lost their island home in Rhodes to the Ottoman Turks, and they were not keen to lose again.

So the Turks really did misunderstand how hard this was going to be, and it actually took them a month to take this tiny castle, and at huge cost.

The Turkish leader apparently said at the time, if the son has cost us this much, what will we have to pay for the father?

Meaning big?

Fort sant' Angelo, on the other side of the Grand Harbour, which was the headquarters of the knights, also still there, and can also be visited.

Both of these forts are open to being visited and they both really do reward it.

St Elmo now has the National War Museum inside it.

I'm no military historian, but that is a really interesting museum, whether you are interested in military history or not, and it has a great coverage of the Great Siege and the World War II period.

Fort San Angelo is Malta's history in a nutshell.

It's a wonderful place because it goes right through from the medieval time through the period of the Knights, and then it was the headquarters of the Royal Navy in Malta, right the way through the British era.

So it goes right the way through.

Was that where Prince Philip was based then, the husband of Queen Elizabeth ii, before she became Queen, they were stationed in Malta?

Yes, that's right.

And so was it Fort San Angelo that he was based out of?

Fort sant' Angelo was where the Navy was headquartered when he was there?

Yes, absolutely.

And they were there shortly after they were married and the Queen is always understood to have loved that time.

She had so much freedom in Malta.

I mean, she was able to drive around in her own little open top car.

She went to parties.

The Phoenicia Hotel, which is the sort of grande dame colonial hotel of Malta.

It's just outside the walls of Valletta and it's actually at a peak at the moment.

It's a lovely hotel, even if you can't afford to stay there, which most of us can't, A lovely place to go and have a drink in the art Deco foyer bar.

And the Queen and Prince Philip, then Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip used to go there for dinners and dances and there are some lovely photographs of them in the ballroom at the Phoenicia Hotel.

She really did just travel around.

There's a lovely story which I had almost firsthand of a guy whose car had broken down and he was trying.

He had the bonnet up and he was trying to fix it and not really getting anywhere.

And this young woman pulled up in an open topped car, got out and said, can I help?

And he said, well, you know, it's just not working.

And she got her head under the bonnet and she fixed his car and he went home to his family and said, you will never guess who just mended my car.

It was Princess Elizabeth, because of course during the war she had been a mechanic, so she actually knew all about how engines worked and she had fixed his car for him.

An indication of the kind of freedom she had in Malta and why she enjoyed it.

I can absolutely see why she would have liked it there.

If you wanted to recreate her and Prince Philip's time in Malta on your trip beyond the Phoenicia Hotel, what are some of the key landmarks that you should make sure you visit?

We'll definitely go and have a drink at the Phoenicia and do it sort of early evening when the pianist is playing, because that would be the time when it will be most like when they were there.

Other than that.

Well, you can go and look at the house that they lived in.

You can't go into it at the moment.

The government has finally bought it and it is being renovated and it will become a museum to their time in Malta in due course.

It's just outside Valletta and it's called Villa Guardamana.

You can go and walk past it for the time being and see how the restoration's coming along.

But in a few years we will actually be able to go inside and visit it and there'll be some memorabilia and a Museum to their time in Malta.

They already had Charles.

But the story goes that Anne was conceived in Malta.

A Maltese royal.

The story goes.

So back into Valletta itself.

Who did the Knights of The Order of St John Report to?

They were given a lot of independence, but they were linked to the Vatican.

They were a Catholic order of shorthand.

One would call them warrior monks.

So they were a religious order.

They took vows that weren't always kept of poverty, chastity and obedience.

But at times, they became more like a princely court.

And in 64, Malta got independence and the Grandmaster's palace became the parliament building of independent Malta.

It's actually still the office of the president, but the MPs have moved up to the new Renza Piano building by City Gate, still in Valletta.

And there's a restoration, ongoing restoration project which is putting the Grandmaster's palace back to the way it was at the time of the Knights.

And you can now visit much more of it.

You can visit the Knights Armoury, which has been put back much more to the way it was.

And there's some very interesting and some very beautiful ceremonial armour as well.

And then there are the state rooms of the Grandmaster.

And even the Grandmaster's bedroom has recently been reopened.

And it's right in the main square.

You can't miss it.

And the other building that you can't miss, right in the heart of Valletta is the Co Cathedral.

A very odd term for people who haven't come across a Co Cathedral before.

Some people also call it the Pro Cathedral, which confused me even more.

Oh, that's another one.

The Pro Cathedral is somewhere else.

Okay, that's why I got confused.

Yes, that is very confusing.

No, St. John's is a CO Cathedral and it's CO because it wasn't originally a cathedral.

It was the Knights Church.

So it was completely separate from the Maltese diocese.

The main cathedral for Malta was in Mdina and always had been.

When the Knights arrived, they built their own massive church in the middle of their new town.

What do you do with it?

So the British kind of went to the Vatican and said, what do you think?

And the Vatican said, okay, we will give it cathedral status.

And so the knights church became the co cathedral with the cathedral of the diocese in Mdina.

That's so interesting, given that it was British at that point, that those decisions were being made.

There was no push to turn it into an Anglican cathedral.

No, that would not have gone down well in Malta.

Malta is a Catholic country.

At that time it would have been 98, 99% Catholic.

They would not have been pleased to see this spectacular church become Anglican.

But that's where your pro cathedral comes in.

The pro cathedral is the Anglican cathedral and it's not pro because it's Protestant, it's pro because a pro cathedral has cathedral status but doesn't have a bishop.

Malta doesn't have enough Anglicans to have a bishop.

So it's connected in fact to the Diocese of Gibraltar.

Oh, wow, that's a long journey.

Queen Adelaide went to Malta for her health shortly after her husband had died, discovered that the Anglican congregation was meeting in a cramped room in the Grandmaster's palace, was horrified and put up the money to build a proper Anglican church.

It's a rather beautiful neoclassical, very calm church.

It is a complete contrast with St. John's St. John's is a must see.

It is the most dazzling baroque church interior in Europe.

It's the most extraordinary place.

You look at the outside and it's quite plain.

It's elegant, but it's plain.

Almost military.

It's the way Valletta was built.

It was military, it was functional, it wasn't full of curlicues and columns.

It was the middle of the 17th century when the knights went balmy for baroque, that they redid a lot of the facades.

And in the case of St. John's the facade wasn't particularly redone.

So it still looks quite plain from the outside, but the inside is completely insane.

Every inch is covered in paint coloured marble or gold.

And it is actually gold, it's gold leaf and it's been recently redone.

So it is a completely sparkling and rather overwhelming experience, but definitely worth seeing.

And the artist that is totally connected to this co cathedral is Caravaggio.

People will have heard of his art perhaps, but they might not be aware that he, for a period, not hugely long, but for a period, was a knight.

Yes, he arrived in 16 oh, 8.

He was escaping from a murder charge.

Caravaggio was an absolutely brilliant artist.

He also had serious anger management problems, and not for the first time.

He had been involved in a brawl and he had ended up killing a man in Rome and he had to leave because he had a price on his head.

And he went down to Naples and then to Sicily, and then we find him on a knight galley going to Malta, probably officially invited as a sort of court artist to the Knights.

Grandmaster at the time, Aloft de Winicourt.

We know that he had been looking for an artist.

We don't know for sure that the answer was Caravaggio, but it looks very likely.

And Caravaggio may have thought that this was a good way of rehabilitating himself by becoming a member of the Order of the Knights.

Now, the Knights didn't normally take murderers.

They also didn't normally take people who couldn't pay quite a substantial joining fee.

And there's actually a letter from the Pope to the Grand Master agreeing that this man with a deeply dodgy past can become a knight.

Caravaggio is not named, but the timing is exactly right.

So he arrives, he becomes a novice.

He doesn't have money to pay an entrance fee.

So the chances are that the painting that he did for the newly built oratory of St John's Co Cathedral was his joining fee.

And it's a huge painting of the beheading of St. John the Baptist, who is the patron saint of the knights and of that church, St John's Co Cathedral.

And it's phenomenal.

I mean, you stand in that room and this painting takes up the whole end of the room.

He was a really theatrical painter and he painted space.

He left space in his paintings in a way that was incredibly unusual at the time.

So you feel as though you're in this painting.

It's a very visceral, very human kind of memento mori.

You're watching as an executioner cuts off the head of John the Baptist.

And he hasn't quite.

He's sort of half done it, but he hasn't quite finished the job.

And the novices were being taught in front of this.

They were learning that this is what the order is about.

It is an order that runs on martyrdom in a holy war.

This is what you've got to be prepared to do if you're joining this order, it's his largest painting.

It's the only one he signed.

And he signed it in blood.

Not his blood, the blood of St. John the Baptist in the picture.

You have to remember that Caravaggio at the time, had a price on his head.

If someone had chopped off Caravaggio's head and taken it to the Vatican, they'd have been paid for it.

So that idea of beheading was pretty personal.

Yes, that spoke pretty loudly to him.

But not loudly enough that he didn't then get into future altercations.

Yeah, no, not loudly enough that he could control his temper, no.

Within a matter of weeks, he'd got himself into another fight.

A senior knight was injured.

Two knights were blamed, almost certainly correctly, including Caravaggio.

And he was imprisoned, in fact, in Fort sant' Angelo on the other side of the Grand Harbour, from which he escaped.

Now, when you look at Fort sant', Angelo, you will see why.

I don't think he escaped without help.

And also, there was a boat waiting for him that took him off to Sicily.

So somebody helped him.

And it may well be that even the institution of the knights were keen to not have to deal with him anymore.

And in fact, he was disinvested as a knight, if that's a word, in the Oratory of St. John's beneath his own painting, where the records say he was cut off like a fetid limb.

Gosh.

There's another artist very connected with the cathedral, called Mattia Pretti, who actually decorated the whole of the interior of the cathedral itself.

And he was an Italian knight about half a century after Caravaggio.

And actually, you can see the influence of Caravaggio in his work.

What is it that got you into Malta to begin with?

It all happened slightly by chance.

I went out to do a piece for the Guardian on a family trip to Gozo, in fact, and I really liked Gozo.

Gozo is lovely.

It's small, it's only 14km by 7, but it's quite varied.

It's a bit more fertile than Malta, it's more rural.

The pace of life is slow, it's very friendly.

It's got good beaches, rocky inlets to swim in, and it also has the gigantea temples, which are some of the oldest pieces of Neolithic architecture.

I visited there and thought, wow, these are fascinating.

And, you know, we all know about Stonehenge, but here were these actual buildings that were older than that, and I thought this was fascinating and I wanted to come back and discover the sites that are on the main island as well.

And a year later I happened to be chatting to Hilary Bratt, who began the Brat Guides.

We were talking about Malta because we'd both been there and how fascinating it was and how little most of us knew about that.

How in Britain its perception was really as a sun and sea destination, much less focused on the history and certainly on the prehistory than we felt there ought to be.

And we were talking about guidebooks and, you know, what they do and how they do.

I didn't write guidebooks.

I had no intention of writing a guidebook.

But two weeks later I got an email saying, would you write us a Guidebook to Malta?

And when you've written that much about a place and learned that much about a place, there's not much point in stopping there.

I've now updated the guidebook.

It's on its fifth edition.

And that's how I've ended up with this weird little specialism in Malta.

It's so interesting that it's an accidental family holiday that sprung into something so big a chance conversation then grows from there with the Brat Guide.

It's now on edition number five.

How important is it to make sure you've got the up to date version?

What's the reason that people within the industry would go back and refresh a guidebook and then reissue it?

10 When the first one was written.

The fort still there it is.

For starters, the gastronomic scene has changed completely.

Its reputation 20, 30 years ago for food was not great.

That has changed completely.

They've gone back to their Maltese roots.

Mediterranean food in Malta is fantastic.

There are great restaurants.

They've now got seven Michelin starred restaurants.

But you can also get really good food for much, much less than that and for less than you would get it in the UK as well.

The fresh fish is brilliant.

They know exactly how to cook it.

There's been a lot of restoration of historic areas.

The bastions of Valletta have been restored in that time.

The Cittadella Gozo has been restored in that time and really, really well restored.

This is particularly since joining the eu.

There's been EU money put into some of these historic restorations and well spent, to be fair.

Mostly the restoration projects for the Valletta Bastions, for the Citadel in Gozo.

These sort of projects have been really well done.

A huge amount has changed and the place has changed socially as well.

When I wrote the first guidebook, I had to rather uncomfortably advise LGBTQ people to be a little bit wary of shows of affection in public because they wouldn't be welcome locally.

That has now, thankfully, changed completely.

And for the last several years, Malta has topped the Rainbow Index for LGBTQ travellers.

So much has shifted in that time.

I would say definitely it's worth having the most up to date guidebook.

Things really, really had changed quite a lot.

And when you're going out to refresh a piece, which you've already put so much into, how much of it is tweaking around the edges, checking existing information is up to date and how much of it do you see as the opportunity to write a new story?

Yes, the new one isn't just the opportunity to upgrade.

Update that with the latest research, the latest discoveries, the latest new museums.

It is also adding a few stories.

In the latest edition, one of Valletta's closed convents.

It had been a closed nunnery for hundreds of years, has opened part of it to the public.

And that's a really interesting story.

There were quite a lot of convents in Malta and they're now really struggling to get new nuns.

And so they're beginning to open up and tell their story.

And I found this place really interesting.

I went and interviewed a man who helps on the front desk sometimes, who happens to be the brother of the current Mother Superior.

He was 6 when his 18 year old older sister, who was like a second mother to him, went into the nunnery.

And at the time it was a closed nunnery.

He didn't see her for a whole year.

And he talks really movingly about the combination of the family's pride at having somebody going into a nunnery and his sorrow missing his big sister.

Even when he got to visit, it was through a tiny little slot in a wall.

And anything they gave her, anything they brought for her, food or whatever, had to be put through a system so that they didn't actually touch.

And it was years before he was able to hug his sister.

Again, it's just quite touching through his personal view of it.

That's in the new book.

There are so many stories.

The personal side, let's talk food, because you did say that over your time working through these additions, the food has got better.

My advice would be go Mediterranean because they really do it extremely well.

If you wanted to discover really good Maltese food, I would go to a little family run cellar restaurant in Valletta called Legliguin.

It actually now has a mention in the Mishla Guide.

The food's fantastic, but it's not a fancy place and it doesn't want to be.

It's run by a father and son and they do a tasting menu with eight or nine courses.

Raw fish as a starter, Maltese sausage.

You might find lamb dishes or pork dishes, fresh fish dishes.

One of my favorite Maltese foods, rather bizarrely, is bigila.

It's a source of hummus equivalent, but it doesn't taste like hummus, it's crushed up beans crushed with olive oil and garlic.

They also know all about wine, Maltese and European, so you can do a pairing if you want to, but it's not Michelin prices.

I think it's about €45 now for dinner.

You have got that Middle Eastern influence, but you've also got very heavy influence from Italy and from Sicily for sure.

There's a lot of very nice thermic pasta and the best of it you get filled with local cheese, gibena, and it's little tiny individual cheeses, about a few centimeters across, circular.

And you can get those fresh where they're made that day, or dried where they've been dried for a week or two.

You sometimes get them marinated or in pepper.

A wonderful place to try those is tarikandu in the citadel in gozo, right next to the cathedral.

Inside the citadel he milks his own goats and sheep.

He has his own little dairy where he makes the fresh cheese in the morning and you eat it at lunchtime.

And he makes fabulous ravioli with the cheese inside it.

He's also famous for rabbit, which is another national dish.

The other place to eat rabbit is Umjar, which is a village in the north of Malta which has several traditional restaurants that produce the rabbit dishes very well.

There's a whole range of really good, really interesting wine produced on the island.

That's another thing that's changed dramatically in the last 15, 20 years.

Some of it's not cheap because it's such small production, but some of it is very doable.

There are two wine grapes on the island that are endemic.

They exist only in Malta and those are used in a few of the wines, which makes them quite interesting.

And you can't get them anywhere else because the production is so small they don't export.

So have your Maltese wine on Malta.

If you're going to a restaurant or a bar, would you tip?

You don't have to, but if you get good service, tip them 10%.

Partly because it was a British colony for so long.

The attitude to tipping is pretty similar to Britain.

The wrap up round up quick fire finish is now ready for boarding.

What would you say is the top thing to see or do in Malta?

Wander Valletta.

Wanderum Diemna.

Just walking around the streets is a lovely thing to do and you'll especially if you look up as well as along, you will just pick up the fabulous facades.

You'll find people doing their own thing.

In lower Valletta.

You might see something from the past, like a woman lowering a basket from her galleria.

The Galleria, these wonderful, brightly painted enclosed wooden balconies that are characteristic of the streets of Valletta and other parts of Malta.

You might see someone lowering a basket to have some vegetables or a loaf of bread put into it for her so she can raise it back up to her home.

I wouldn't miss St. John's and the Caravaggios if you're remotely interested in archaeology or the distant past.

I would definitely go to at least one of the temple sites and I think that boat trip around the Grand Harbour is a lovely thing to do.

How about a tourist trap to avoid?

Not necessarily avoid, but think carefully about the Blue Lagoon.

The Blue Lagoon is Malta's most popular swimming spot and it is beautiful with sort of turquoise, luminous blue water coming up from bright white sand on the seabed.

But the shore gets staggeringly crowded and they've now introduced a booking system because it was getting completely out of hand.

Whatever transport you're taking, you have to book a slot so that they can limit the number of people to 4,000 at a time.

Three slots a day.

It's packed.

There are plenty of other lovely places to swim without having to book online.

What is your favourite time of year to visit Malta?

I like October.

There is a risk of autumn storms anytime from about mid September, so you can hit a couple of days of real stormy weather and then everything comes to a grinding halt because there's flooding and there's this and there's that.

But when it isn't that, it's beautiful.

It's extremely sunny and the sea is still warm, so you can still go to the beach, you can still swim, but it's not so hot that you're uncomfortable doing the sights.

What would you say is a book recommendation for anybody interested in Malta?

Well, I'd have to start with the Brat Guide, wouldn't I?

Malta and goes into the Brat Guide by Juliet Riggs.

There's a novel that I really like.

It's called the Capellan of Malta and it's by Nicholas Montserrat.

What I like about it is that apart from just being a good novel and a really good read, it covers about 7,000 years of Malta's history.

So it's set in the Second World War, but because during the Second World War, everything underground was used for people to hide from the bombing.

That included some of the Neolithic areas, the Hypogea and the underground Stone Age sites.

And so he manages to bring in the whole of Malta's history, starting from the Neolithic and going onwards.

So you get a real sense of Malta and its.

Its history whilst reading what is frankly a good novel.

What would you say is the top food or drink to try on a trip to Malta?

Well, definitely fresh fish, preferably done quite simply, either grilled or in wine and with local capers.

Capers grow in Malta and that's a lovely way to eat local fish.

So fresh fish, definitely.

But also there are a couple of traditional Maltese snacks that are worth a try.

There's pastitsi, which are little puff pastry pasties and they're filled with either the local cheese we were talking about, which is lovely, or with mushed up peas.

Beware vegetarians, it sometimes has pork in it and they never talk about that, they just call it a pea pastizzi.

So, yeah, but they're both very nice and those are sold on street corners in little pasticeria, often little tiny places that just sell pastizzi.

That is the classic mid morning Maltese snack.

If you have a sweeter tooth, I would go for IM Art I M Q A R E T, which is a little deep fried pastry that's filled with date flavoured with fennel seed.

Wild fennel grows in Malta too.

That is delicious and I'm afraid it's best straight out of the oil.

Allow yourself one of those at least.

They're really very nice.

And finally, if you want to take a bit of Malta home with with you as a keepsake of your time there, what's an authentic souvenir that you can keep an eye out for?

Well, two of the classics are silver filigree and lace.

Silver filigree is made across Malta and the classic one is a Maltese cross, which is really a Knight of Malta cross made with silver filigree.

But you don't have to have the cross.

There are earrings, there are, there are all sorts of things made with silver filigree and there are places where you can watch it being made as well with lace.

You want to be a little careful because there's quite a lot made in China now available at some of the shops and markets.

But if you go, for example, to the little lace shop in the Citadel in Gozo, or there are a couple of shops in Valletta that are more traditional, you can find real authentic handmade lace.

Otherwise, I think food is quite a good one.

There's great local honey.

There's honey rings which aren't actually made with honey, which is a laugh.

They're a not particularly sweet round pastry filled with a kind of molasses with fennel seed.

Juliet Ricks, travel and features writer and the author of the Brat Guide to Malta and Gozo, thank you so much for unlocking Malta for us today.

Thank you.

Thank you very much again to Juliet Ricks for enlightening us on Malta.

What a fascinating place.

It is, so laden with history as well as being beautiful on the eye.

It's very much worth a visit.

So I hope this conversation has inspired you to put Malta on your list, if it isn't already there.

And do make sure you are following the Date Destination Unlocked podcast, wherever you're currently listening to this episode.

And that way you'll easily be able to find us again the next time you want to go armchair traveling somewhere.

Lovely.

Until then, bye bye.