Mdina
Central MaltaMalta's old capital behind honey-coloured walls: 202 residents, hardly any cars, and centuries of quiet.
The place today
Two hundred and two people live inside these walls, and most of them would rather you whispered. Mdina is called the Silent City and takes it seriously: cars are essentially residents-only, so the loudest thing on Triq Villegaignon is a horse pulling a karrozzin (traditional cab) over the slabs. Come at ten and you'll share the lanes with tour groups photographing the blue door in Pjazza Mesquita that was in Game of Thrones; come after seven, when the lamps come on and the limestone goes the colour of honey, and you'll have the place to yourself. I take visitors to the bastions behind the cathedral first: on a clear day you get Valletta, the Mosta dome and half the island's flat roofs in one look. Then cake at Fontanella, which has been doing chocolate cake on the ramparts for decades. When you want a proper meal, walk out of the gate: Rabat is two minutes away and does the living for both towns.
How it got here
The plateau has been fortified for nearly three thousand years. Phoenicians settled it around the 8th century BC; the Romans made it Melite, a municipium whose town spread over roughly three times today's citadel. Tradition says the governor Publius welcomed the shipwrecked St Paul here in AD 60. In 870 an Aghlabid army besieged and sacked the Byzantine city; Arab rulers later refortified a smaller, more defensible core behind a ditch and gave it the name that stuck: mdina, the walled city. Count Roger's Normans arrived in 1091, and under the Crown of Aragon it became Città Notabile, seat of the nobility and of the Università, Malta's governing council. When the Knights of St John arrived in 1530 they preferred the harbour, and the capital moved for good with Valletta's founding in 1566; Mdina kept its old families and lost its bustle. The 1693 Sicily earthquake wrecked the medieval cathedral; Lorenzo Gafà's Baroque replacement rose between 1697 and 1702, with Palazzo Vilhena and the French Baroque main gate following in the 1720s. The uprising against the French began here in September 1798. It has dozed, magnificently, ever since.