Dingli: Making tracks

The kids and I had spent a day exploring the prehistoric temple ruins at Hagar Qim and Mnajdra, archaeological wonders built over 5,000 years ago on the island of Malta. The temples, especially Hagar Qim, were big and mysterious, built between 3600 and 3200 BC in the bulbous Ggantija style.

We were making our way back to the capital, Valletta, on a clifftop road that ran high above the sea and came to Dingli, an ochre, limestone town with a silver-topped church that, while attractive, didn't seem to offer anything special enough to warrant a stop.

Until I looked into a field and saw the ruts.

We parked and walked along what looked like ancient cart tracks. I later learned that the Dingli Cart Ruts may have been made and used by Bronze Age settlers from Sicily as early as 2000 BC. Another theory links them to more recent 7th- century BC Phoenicians, one of the many peoples who have left their mark on this island nation at the crossroads of the Mediterranean.

Our walk along the enigmatic ruts was a fitting end to a day of exploring Malta's prehistory. We'd begun the day by walking through big wonders and ended it by walking through little ones.



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Mosta: The bomb miracle

After getting spectacularly lost on an unending series of thin roads hedged by walls of limestone boulders, I finally found the main road to Mosta, Malta.

I saw Mosta long before I reached it, thanks to the honey-hued mass of the Church of St. Mary, also known as the Rotunda of Mosta or, simply, Mosta Dome. It rose high above and stood out against the bleached, sugar cube architecture that covers most of Malta.

Fashioned after the Roman Pantheon, whose massive dome remains the archetype for unreinforced concrete construction, Mosta Dome was financed by the town's citizens and consecrated in 1871. Mosta's dome mimics the Pantheon's right down (or up) to its eye-shaped oculus, open to the sky.

The church was a thing of beauty, source of pride and place of solace, but in 1942 it became the scene of a miracle, the Mosta Bomb Miracle.

A Luftwaffe sortie dropped three bombs on the church while 300 worshippers were inside. Two bombs bounced off the dome, but one pierced it, dropped into the church, slid across the floor, and came to a stop, without exploding. No one killed or injured.

Today the gift shop in Mosta Dome's sacristy sells postcards and mini-domes for your knick-knack shelf and also hosts a replica of the ill-fated (or blessed, depending on which side of the war you were on) bomb.

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Chasing rainbows

There's been a lot of hammering lately in my neighborhood. I thought it was people doing seasonal home maintenance -- fixing up porches and installing new screens in sunrooms to get ready for summer. But today it hit me. My neighbors are building arks. And, as soon as Mike gets home, I'm going to suggest we do the same. I'll pack a box filled with two of everything we think we can't live without and leave it by the door.

It's been raining here in the northeastern United States for what seems like a biblically long time. I can't remember the last time I saw sun, and if the meteorological prognosticators see any in our future, they're keeping it to themselves.

Today's wind-whipped torrents remind me of a furious tempest that barreled in off the sea one afternoon when the kids and I were walking the promenade in Sliema, Malta. We retreated to our hotel room and watched the tumult through the wet glass of our balcony door.

Then the rain stopped, and God sent Malta a rainbow. I hope he's got one up there for us New England arkbuilders.

The Fat Lady of Malta

We pulled into the small dirt parking lot that sits near Malta’s Neolithic temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra and handed our money to a man who looked like Popeye. His face was grizzled by sun and sea spray, his teeth were several short of a full set, and his sailor cap sat high and to one side, calling attention to his large walnut forehead. He was delighted to see the kids, and he dug around in the pockets of his baggy pants and produced two fistfuls of hard candy, which Adam and Dana sucked on while listening to his tales of the mystical structures we were about to visit. Before we headed off to the temples, he promised to personally guard our car and pointed us to the free toilets. “Don’t use the toilets in the Hagar Qim Restaurant. You have to pay fifty cents each.”

After we saved a dollar and a half, we headed over the rise and were greeted by the magnificent sight of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra sitting on a sweeping hillside above the sea. Below the massive, 5000-year-old limestone ruins, terraced vegetable plots ran to the cliff edge, and ship-shaped Filfla, Malta’s smallest island, floated in the near distance. The temples are splendid, the setting glorious.

The kids took off down the path that led to the temple complex, a place older than the pyramids at Giza. Malta, which sits in the Mediterranean northeast of the Tunisian coast and some 50 miles south of Sicily (Maltese travel agencies offer quick trips via high-speed hydrofoil to both places) has a rich, remarkable history, and even before the peripatetic Phoenicians found it as they cruised their world, Malta was home to an organized society of temple-builders who worshiped the Mother Goddess and erected complexes like Hagar Qim, Mnajdra and Ggantija on Gozo, the second largest island in the Maltese archipelago.

The island nation of Malta is peppered with spectacular megalithic temples erected by the ancients to venerate their goddess of fertility, and some of the complexes are, themselves, shaped like robust, pregnant women. “This room is the belly,” I said to the kids as we explored Ggantija, Gozo's "place of giants.” (They didn’t say “yuck.” My kids are cool.) The people who built these temples also carved statues and statuettes of healthy, round women, and seven of them, including the famous (and tiny – just a few centimeters high) “Venus of Malta,” were found at Hagar Qim, which means “standing stones” in Maltese (Malti).

The statues and figurines are poignantly beautiful and simple. Like the Maltese landscape, stark and unadorned. Unearthed from their temple homes, most of the statues of ancient Malta’s “fat lady culture” now rest in the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, Malta’s capital and a World Heritage Site. The museum, which boasts a vivid central ceiling fresco, was built in 1571 as an auberge for the Knights of Malta. As you make your way through the building to view the exquisite fat ladies, you can walk atop sections of floor that have been peeled back and replaced with Plexiglas to afford views onto stone steps and vaulted chambers that run below street level.

In a souvenir shop near the museum, I bought a cheap copy of a Malta fat lady. White, pure, basic. She sits in the sun by my living room window on a green marble tabletop that she shares with two other small, simple, white objects I’ve collected in my travels – a slab of antique Chinese white jade the size of a deck of cards depicting a bustling family scene (pre-one child policy days), and a knock-off of an ancient Greek Cycladic sculpture of a serene, hairless, goddess, sleek and chiseled except for her pregnant middle. I have the two goddesses facing each other so they can dish and enjoy some girl talk.


(A warm hello to Robert Micallef, a Maltese economist who found my blog and enjoyed a November post about horse racing in Marsa, Malta, Robert's father's hometown. Robert's blog, Wired Temples, is about all things Maltese. Check it out. One of the joys of publishing this blog is "meeting" people from around the world. I love opening my emailbox and finding a message from a faraway reader. Since starting this blog in October, my book website, LoriHein.com, has been visited by people from China, Iran, Mexico, the UK, Germany, the Philippines, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Canada, Greece... I continue to be amazed at the combined power of words, pictures, travel and the Internet to bring people together. Thanks for letting me share my stories with you. Where shall we go next?)

Horse racing in Malta

We watched the Breeder's Cup on TV this weekend. For Dana, my 12-year-old, the horse races ranked up there with Halloween trick or treating as the highlight of her weekend. As we watched, I thought of the sun-splashed Sunday on the island of Malta when I brought her to the national race track in Marsa. Sulky racing is big in Malta, and the track is the place to be on Sunday after church.

We paid the four dollar entrance fee and joined the crowd cheering the silk-clad drivers and their equine partners. Between races, the men in the crowd would disappear into the cool tunnel behind the grandstand where a line of betting windows had been cut into a wall. They laid down wagers on trotters like D'Artagnan, Pay Night and other local favorites. Everyone was laughing and enjoying the Sunday afternoon scene -- the spectators, the bettors, the men booking the bets. They joked and talked and smiled. Comfortable amounts of money were on the line. Amounts that could be shrugged off if lost.

Outside the racecourse, grooms and sulky drivers led shiny-coated trotters, some harnessed to their carts, through Marsa's dusty, narrow streets. The sun turned the silk on the drivers' uniforms into electric blues and reds and yellows and bathed the pastel stucco of Marsa's old buildings in brilliant, ochre light. I watched the people. Dana watched the horses. It wasn't the Breeder's Cup. It was better. A day at the races, Maltese style.


Travel America with excerpts from Lori's Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America

Sulky racing in Malta

...Place your bets, boys. May the best trotter win.

A day at the (Maltese) races

...Smiling spectators wager short money on local favorites

The streets of Marsa, Malta on race day

...Silk-clad drivers and shiny-coated trotters clog the streets on race day.

Marsa, Malta

...Marsa's sun-splashed-walls.