With a total area of just over 300 square kilometres, Malta comprises the islands of Malta, Gozo and Comino. It’s one of the world’s most diminutive countries, smaller than the island of Montreal. And there are numerous reasons to visit. 

Beaches on Gozo beckon, and the diving at Merkati Reef comes highly recommended. In Valletta, MUŻA, the National Museum of Art, contains multitudes, including (for attentive Canadians) a 1925 plaster statue of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

A glass of robust Maltese red (and maybe even a refill) is reason enough to pass by the Tà Betta Wine Estates in Siġġiewi.

If you’re here for the history, you don’t have to do much more than wander to get started. Simply strolling down the street in Valletta feels like an act of archeology: wherever you go, you’re sifting shards of the island’s storied past.

The built forms of churches, auberges, and citadels, as well as the treasures held within Malta’s museums, are the legacy of the Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. From 1530 to 1798, they ruled Malta and fought their epic battles with the Ottoman Empire.

With devastating modern-day wars underway to the north and east, Malta’s long history of struggle and loss is as resonant today in its own grim way as the bells’ strike from the tower of St. John’s Co-Cathedral.

Approaching the cathedral, you pass the preserved ruins of the Royal Opera House, razed by German bombs in 1942 — a solemn reminder that during the Second World War, as a key British bastion, Malta was among the most bombed places in the world.

After the Knights, the French arrived in 1798 (Napoleon himself stopped by), but with British help, the Maltese soon drove them out. The British imperial reign lasted until 1964, when Malta gained independence; British military forces remained until 1979. 

The Canadians arrived in 1942.

The unavoidable first stop for visitors like me to modern-day Malta is the international airport. During the Second World War, this was the site of RAF Luqa, the principal Allied airfield. A 20-minute drive northwest from the airport lands visitors at Ta’Qali, where the Malta Aviation Museum’s hangars are housed. A sizable Canadian contingent that was based there with the Spitfires of the RAF’s 249 Squadron included Buzz Beurling, from Verdun, Quebec, who in 1942 shot down 27 enemy aircraft in two weeks. Beurling famously ended the war as Canada’s most effective fighter pilot.

The Spitfires helped save Malta, a strategic linchpin in the Second World War dubbed by Winston Churchill “Great Britain’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean.”

Nowadays, the hangars at Ta’ Qali house the Malta Aviation Museum, a meticulously curated collection that includes the remains of a German Messerschmitt Bf 109 and a restored Spitfire IX. In a roomy on-site workshop, revival of the past is an everyday endeavour as volunteers work under an aeronautic engineer to return historical aircraft (some of which arrive as wrecks) to the skies.

We spend the rest of the day zig-zagging across landscape and historical eras, reaching, mid-island, the fortified city of Mdina, Malta’s capital before the Knights arrived. It owes its nickname of “The Silent City” to its timeless atmosphere, as well as the prohibition on cars and, just perhaps, a lack of noontime artillery.

He does pay tribute to the spirit of the Maltese during those calamitous days. “What made the defence of Malta possible, the way I’ve always seen it, was the people”, he writes. 

In 1942, Britain’s King George VI recognized Malta’s heroism and fortitude with the George Cross — the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross. It was the first time that the medal was awarded to an entire population. Today, it’s proudly preserved in the National War Museum at Valletta’s Fort St. Elmo.

There are other ways of seeing Malta, of course through the eyes of its many visitors.

Seventeenth-century Ottoman epithets for the island (uttered, again, in the fervour of battle) include “headquarters for infidels” and, from Suleiman himself, “this cursed island.”

Napoleon, by contrast, decided that Malta boasted the “best harbour in the Mediterranean.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge arrived in Malta in 1804 as a bureaucrat (and, reportedly, in search of a cure for his opium addiction). “The Sky, the Sea, the Bays, the Buildings are all beautiful,” he wrote, “but no Rivers, no brooks, no Hedges, no green fields, almost no Trees & the few that are unlovely.” (He also found Valletta noisy.)

To Edward Lear, the English poet and artist, the glory of Malta demanded a whole new adjective, which he was pleased to invent: the place was purely “pomskizillious.”

It works.