Mdina: Malta’s Silent City

Mdina, Malta’s old capital, sits on a ridge in the centre of the island, a compact walled town of honey-coloured limestone whose bastions and cathedral dome can be seen for miles across the plain. For most of its history it was the island’s seat of government and of its bishops. Today fewer than 300 people live inside the walls, cars are largely kept out, and the quiet of its lanes has earned it the name the Silent City. Just outside the walls lies Rabat, the town that grew over the Roman city’s suburbs, with St Paul’s Grotto and the early Christian catacombs. On Day 4 of both the 25-day Mediterranean Islands of Malta, Sicily, Sardinia & Corsica tour and the 12-day Malta & Sicily small group tour, the group walks through Mdina, stops at the cathedral, and spends the afternoon in Rabat.

Mdina, Malta: a city older than its walls

The ridge was settled long before the present walls. Phoenician colonists established a town here around the eighth century BC, and when Rome took Malta in 218 BC it became Melite, the island’s principal city. The Punico-Roman town was roughly three times the size of today’s Mdina and spread over much of what is now Rabat. At some point the city was cut back to its present, more defensible size. Tradition credits the Arabs with this retrenchment, though some historians now think the Byzantines built it, perhaps in the eighth century.

In 870 the Aghlabids, an Arab dynasty based in North Africa, besieged and destroyed the Byzantine town. When it was later resettled it took the Arabic name it still carries: Mdina comes from madina, meaning simply “the city”, and Rabat from an Arabic word for a suburb. Count Roger I of Sicily took the city for the Normans in 1091, and in the later Middle Ages it was styled Città Notabile, the notable city. Its local nobility ran the island’s affairs through a town council, the Università, from Mdina. For the island-wide story, see our introduction to Malta and its history.

The Knights, the earthquake and the Silent City

The turning point came in 1530, when the Emperor Charles V granted Malta to the Order of St John. Mdina’s nobles ceremonially handed the keys of the city to Grand Master Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, but the Knights were a naval order and settled by the harbour at Birgu instead. When their new fortress city of Valletta rose after the Great Siege of 1565, Mdina became Città Vecchia, the old city. That long quiet, together with the near-absence of traffic today, is where the name the Silent City comes from. Our account of the Knights of St John and their legacy in Malta tells their side of the story.

Much of what you see is the result of disaster. The great earthquake of January 1693, centred on south-eastern Sicily, badly damaged Mdina and brought down much of its medieval cathedral. Rebuilding gave the city a new Baroque face. In 1722 Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena ordered a wider restoration, and his French military architect, Charles François de Mondion, remodelled the entrance and the area around it. The result is a medieval street plan with a largely eighteenth-century front.

The Main Gate and Vilhena Palace

Most visitors enter by the Main Gate, completed in 1724 to Mondion’s design. An arched stone bridge crosses the dry ditch to a Baroque portal of paired pilasters, crowned by the arms of Vilhena and of Mdina and a carved trophy of arms. On the inner face are reliefs of Malta’s patron saints, Paul, Publius and Agatha. The medieval gate stood a few metres to the right and was walled up when the new one was built; its blocked outline is still visible beside the present gate. The gate also had a brief second career on screen, as one of the gates of King’s Landing in the first season of Game of Thrones.

Immediately inside the gate stands Vilhena Palace, built for the Grand Master in the 1720s, again to Mondion’s design, in the Parisian Baroque style. It replaced the seat of the Università on the site of the medieval castle, and was later a hospital until 1956. Since June 1973 it has housed Malta’s National Museum of Natural History. Its collections of minerals, fossils, birds and mammals focus on the wildlife of the Maltese islands. Some parts of the museum cannot be fully reached by visitors with limited mobility.

St Paul’s Cathedral, Mdina

A short walk along Villegaignon Street brings you to St Paul’s Square and the cathedral, the seat of the Archbishop of Malta, which shares the role with St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. Tradition holds that it stands on the site of the house of Publius, the Roman governor who received St Paul after his shipwreck on Malta in AD 60; historians treat this as part of the island’s rich store of Pauline legend. The Norman cathedral of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the one the 1693 earthquake ruined.

Within months of the earthquake the cathedral chapter decided to demolish and rebuild in the Baroque style. The design was by the Maltese architect Lorenzo Gafà, and it is widely regarded as his masterpiece. The new church was consecrated in October 1702, and the dome was completed in 1705. Some of the old building survived and was worked into the new one: the choir and sacristy, a baptismal font dated 1495, choir stalls and the old cathedral’s main door, made in 1530. The high altarpiece, The Conversion of St Paul, is by Mattia Preti, the Calabrian painter who spent much of his later life in Malta.

The Cathedral Museum

Across Archbishop’s Square, the Cathedral Museum occupies the former seminary, a Baroque building put up between 1733 and 1742. The museum was founded in 1897 and moved here in 1969. Its collections include medieval painted panels, church silver, vestments, a coin gallery that runs from antiquity onwards, and a celebrated series of woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer. One ticket covers both the cathedral and the museum.

Palazzo Falson and the medieval streets

Away from the two squares, Mdina is a web of narrow, bending streets. Many of the noble houses keep medieval features behind their later façades. Palazzo Santa Sofia carries the date 1233 on a window lintel and is counted among the oldest buildings still standing in Malta.

The house that rewards a visit most is Palazzo Falson, a thirteenth-century palace on the north side of the city, built on part of the old defences. In 1927 it was bought by Captain Olof Frederick Gollcher, an artist, collector and philanthropist, who renamed it the Norman House and filled it with what he collected: furniture, arms and armour, jewellery, coins, paintings, fans, rugs, manuscripts, silver and glass from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. After his death in 1962 it passed to a foundation in his name. Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti restored the house and opened it as a historic house museum in 2007, and an audio guide in six languages comes with the ticket.

The bastions and the view

Walk north through the city and the streets open onto Bastion Square, on top of the walls. Mdina still has a complete circuit of bastions. From the northern walls the view is one of the widest in Malta: a patchwork of small fields and stone walls, villages, the great dome of the Mosta Rotunda, and on a clear day the sea beyond. It shows at a glance why this ridge was chosen for a capital.

1798: the revolt that began at Mdina

The Silent City has had its loud moments. When Napoleon’s fleet landed in June 1798, Mdina’s council judged resistance futile and surrendered the city to General Vaubois within hours of the landings; the Knights surrendered the island two days later. French rule quickly turned the Maltese against them, above all the seizure of church silver and treasures. On 2 September 1798 an attempt to sell off church property provoked a riot. The French commander of Mdina, Masson, was killed by the crowd in Rabat and his body thrown from a window. At dawn on 3 September the insurgents took Mdina. The French were soon confined to Valletta and blockaded, with British and Portuguese support, until they surrendered in September 1800.

Rabat: St Paul’s Grotto and the Catacombs

Rabat begins at Mdina’s walls, and the tours visit it in the afternoon. Its heart is the Church of St Paul, rebuilt from 1653 and completed by Lorenzo Gafà, the architect of Mdina Cathedral. Beneath it lies St Paul’s Grotto, where, according to Christian tradition, the apostle lived and preached during his three months on the island in AD 60, as described in the Acts of the Apostles. John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis have all prayed here. The adjoining Wignacourt Museum has its own section of rock-cut tombs and the Second World War shelters dug beneath the town.

A few streets away are St Paul’s Catacombs, managed by Heritage Malta, which describes them as the earliest and largest archaeological evidence of Christianity in Malta. Because Roman law forbade burial inside the city, the people of Melite buried their dead outside its walls, and the area holds more than 30 underground burial complexes, used from Punic times through the Roman and Byzantine periods until the seventh, possibly the eighth, century AD. The main complex covers more than 2,000 square metres of interconnected passages. Look for the circular agape tables cut from the living rock near the entrance, where families held commemorative meals for the dead, and the canopied “baldacchino” tombs, a form typical of Malta.

When are Mdina Cathedral and the Cathedral Museum open?

At the time of writing, both are open Monday to Saturday from mid-morning until late afternoon and closed on Sundays and public holidays. The cathedral is a working church and can close early or restrict entry for weddings and services, and these changes are posted in advance on the cathedral chapter’s website. Check it before you go, especially on a Saturday.

Can you drive into Mdina?

No, not as a visitor: entry for vehicles is limited to residents, emergency services, wedding cars and horse-drawn carriages. Coaches and taxis set down outside the walls, close to the Main Gate, and Rabat’s bus stops are a few minutes’ walk away.

How much walking does a day in Mdina and Rabat involve?

A good deal, but most of it is on level or gently sloping streets. Mdina itself is small, and its main streets can be walked end to end in a few minutes, though the limestone paving is polished smooth in places and can be slippery after rain. The underground sites in Rabat ask more of you: the Wignacourt Museum’s access statement warns of uneven natural rock, some steps, narrow passages and low ceilings, and the catacombs are reached by steps and explored on foot underground.

How long should you allow in Mdina?

Half a day is enough to walk the walls and lanes and see the cathedral, and a full day lets you add the Cathedral Museum, Palazzo Falson and the Natural History Museum. Palazzo Falson opens Tuesday to Sunday, and the Heritage Malta sites have their own schedules, so check current hours on their websites. If you want to see the museums inside the walls, consider an extra day in Malta before or after the tour; our suggested Malta itinerary shows how Mdina fits alongside Valletta, Gozo and the prehistoric temples.

Mdina and Rabat on Day 4 of the tours

On both tours, Day 4 is a full-day tour of central Malta. It begins with a walking tour of Mdina and a stop to view the cathedral. The group then drives to Mosta to see the Rotunda, whose great dome was pierced by a German bomb during Mass on 9 April 1942; the bomb did not explode, and a replica of its casing is kept in the sacristy. Lunch is at a local restaurant in Rabat, and the afternoon is spent at St Paul’s Church and Grotto and St Paul’s Catacombs before the return to the hotel, with the rest of the day at leisure. It follows a day in Valletta and its Grand Harbour and precedes the ferry to Gozo on Day 5.

Both tours are rated Level 3, Moderate to Challenging, with up to six hours of activity a day over varied terrain, and an Odyssey Program Leader travels with the group alongside local guides. After five days in Malta and Gozo, both cross to Sicily on Day 6; the 12-day tour ends in Palermo, while the 25-day tour continues to Sardinia and Corsica. Our day-by-day guide to the Mediterranean islands route follows the whole journey.

Mdina repays a slow visit: Roman Melite, the Arab city that named it, the medieval noble town and the Baroque rebuilding after 1693 all survive on one small hilltop. To walk it with a Program Leader and local guides, in a small group of up to 16 travellers, look at the Mediterranean Islands of Malta, Sicily, Sardinia & Corsica or the shorter Malta & Sicily – Mediterranean Islands small group tour.