Mdina and Rabat: the Silent City

Cross the bridge over the dry ditch (now a sunken garden) between Vilhena's stone lions and you are on a film set that happens to be genuine. The gate did in fact play the gate of King's Landing in the first season of Game of Thrones, which my former pupils find more impressive than anything else I taught them. Before you go through, look at the wall a few metres to the right of the bridge: the blocked outline in the masonry is the original medieval gate, abandoned when the entrance was rebuilt. Karozzini (horse cabs) wait on both sides; the horses know the streets better than most guides.

Lorenzo Gafà's dome is the one you have been seeing from half the island; up close, the surprise is the floor: a carpet of inlaid marble tombstones, skulls and coats of arms, the nobility of Malta filed underfoot. Notice the two dials on the façade: one tells the time, the other the date. In the apse, Mattia Preti's fresco of Paul's shipwreck survived the earthquake that flattened the medieval church around it. Your ticket includes the Cathedral Museum around the corner, where a set of Albrecht Dürer prints hangs in the old seminary; most visitors never make it there, which is their loss and your gain.

The city's north-east corner is one long balcony over half of Malta. Straight across the valley stands Mtarfa with its British clock tower; right of it, the grey dome of the Mosta Rotunda, then a run of flat-roofed villages all the way to Valletta's spires and the sea. I used to bring my geography classes up here instead of using the blackboard. One sweep of the arm did the work of a term. Most visitors take the photograph and turn back; stay ten minutes and watch the light move. After dark the same view becomes a net of orange lamps, and you will likely have it alone.

Triq Villegaignon carries nearly all the foot traffic, which means two turns off it buy you the city as it actually is. Take Triq Inguanez or any lane that looks too narrow to bother with: honey-coloured walls, brass dolphin door knockers (il-ħabbata), the odd caper bush growing from a joint in the stone. The bends are not decorative: they were cut to break the wind, shade the street and slow an attacker. Some 250 people still live behind these doors, which is why the city stays swept, planted and quiet. Walk the lanes at dusk when the lamps come on and you will understand the nickname without a plaque explaining it.

Fontanella Tea Garden hangs on the bastion at the end of Bastion Street, and its chocolate cake has been on the menu for over forty years; I have marked a great many exercise books over a slice of it. The kitchen does savoury platters too, but nobody is really here for those. The point is the table position: the wall-edge seats give you the same panorama as Bastion Square, with a fork in your hand. At noon in season there is a queue; at opening time or after five there is not. In winter, the upstairs glasshouse is the seat to have.

Down in Rabat, a modest doorway on Triq Sant'Agata drops you into streets of the dead: rock-cut corridors, chambers and graves of every size, including the small ones nobody enjoys thinking about. Notice the round agape tables carved from the living rock near the entrances: families reclined there for memorial meals among their dead, which tells you the place felt less grim to them than it does to us. The main complex takes most visitors' attention; the numbered smaller hypogea across the garden are quieter, stranger, and usually empty of everyone but you.

Rabat's parish square is the honest counterpart to Mdina's theatre: St Paul's church above the Grotto, old men on benches, and the smell of pastry drifting from Triq San Pawl. Is-Serkin (Crystal Palace on the sign) has been turning out pastizzi (flaky pastries of ricotta or mushy peas) since the 1940s, at around sixty cents apiece, tea served in a glass, cash only, open practically round the clock. At the counter you will find farmers, police coming off shift and, at 4am, half the island's nightclub crowd. Order at the bar, take a plastic chair, and accept that the flakes go everywhere. This is the correct end to the walk.