All my life I’d wanted to visit Malta. My interest stemmed in part from family lore: My French grandfather’s grandfather was a Maltese immigrant to French Algeria, born in 1820 in Rabat, just outside Mdina’s walls; our name, Messud, is a distortion of Mifsud, to this day common in Malta. Malta sits like a jewel in the middle of that storied sea, 100 miles south of Sicily and 240 miles northeast of Tunisia. PhotoPhotoWe started with Mdina because in Malta, on Sundays, most of the shops are still closed, and we’d been warned by our hotel that Valletta would be dozy. BUT MALTA IS by no means trapped in its past.

Source: New York Times November 30, 2017 17:57 UTC