Rabat
Central MaltaCatacombs under the streets, Malta's best pastizzi above them: Mdina's workaday twin does the living.
The place today
Mdina gets the postcards; Rabat gets the life. This is a working town of just under twelve thousand, and it wraps around the Silent City like the suburb it has always been (rabat literally means suburb). Start where everyone starts: Is-Serkin, officially the Crystal Palace, the strip-lit pastizzi bar near the Mdina gate that never seems to close. A pastizz (flaky pastry filled with ricotta or mushy peas) costs well under a euro, tea comes in a glass, and in the small hours you'll queue behind taxi drivers and wedding parties in equal numbers. Above ground it's band clubs, ironmongers and grandmothers on doorsteps; below ground it's another town entirely: galleries of catacombs running under streets whose residents treat them with total indifference. The festa of St Paul on the first Sunday of July is one of the loudest in Malta, all confetti and brass. Give it a full day, not the spare hour most people allow after Mdina.
How it got here
Rabat is what is left of Roman Melite, which sprawled far beyond today's Mdina; when the Arabs shrank the fortified city after 870, everything outside the new walls became the rabad, the suburb, and the name never changed. Roman law banned burials inside the city, so the dead were cut into the rock out here: St Paul's Catacombs, Malta's largest early-Christian cemetery complex, stayed in use into the 7th and possibly 8th century AD, and St Agatha's crypt nearby is tied by legend to the Sicilian girl said to have sheltered in Malta from Roman persecution around 250. The deeper tradition is Pauline: the Apostle reputedly spent his three months on the island (AD 60) in the grotto beneath the parish church, which made Rabat a pilgrimage stop for centuries; Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt endowed a college of chaplains for the grotto in the early 1600s, and its building now houses the Wignacourt Museum. In February 1881 a workman digging outside Mdina struck the mosaic floor of a rich Roman townhouse, now the Domvs Romana museum. Rabat supplied Mdina through the Knights' and British centuries, and still does.
