Mention Malta and most people picture package holidays, British retirees, and apartment blocks overlooking the sea. Most people, it turns out, are wrong. Away from the high-rises and heaving bars of St. Julian’s, in the Three Villages of Attard, Balzan, and Lija, there exists an entirely different reality, where the island’s layered past still feels close at hand. It was here that aristocratic families and wealthy merchants once built their summer palaces far from the noise and heat of Valletta, the striking 16th-century capital.
They weren’t the first to settle in Malta. Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, and Normans all passed through before the Knights of St. John arrived in 1530; the British followed in 1800, leaving behind sun-baked villages crowned by limestone churches and medieval forts. There is even a Caravaggio on the island, painted during the artist’s exile there—the largest canvas he ever made and the only one he signed.
