The romance of Malta is a subtle thing. I look for it in sunsets, and in seas so sharply coloured they could pass for pound-shop emeralds. By the time I leave, I will know that the source of Dashiell Hammett's title, The Maltese Falcon, is the tribute the Knights of Malta had to pay the Emperor as a form of rent. I will have imagined Saracens and Crusaders locked in combat, seen ancient monuments dressed in the grunge garb of old stones, wondered at the insistence on good manners and civility, and at obeying all the rules. My legs will be burnt because I hoisted up my skirts too high and for too long on the deck of a tour ship circling the Grand Harbour, desperate for a touch of colour to take home.
I will come closer to understanding why Sam Beckett so loved Caravaggio's The Mar- tyrdom of John the Baptist, painted specially for the Knights of Malta at Valletta Cathedral, but represented only through a huge colour photograph when I visit because it has spent nearly two years in Italy being restored. The Cathedral offers another Caravaggio dedicated to St Jerome, perfectly placed near windows the artist had specially requested so as to line up natural light with the rays he painted over Jerome's shoulder. There are relics too: the grisly digit of Thomas Aquinas most interests me, but my Latin is too rusty to identify other individual body parts. Yards of silent floor-set tombstones under which generations of Knights crumble softly fill the Cathedral, inscribed in coloured marbles with the fading languages of heraldry and religious iconography.
The knights were hospitallers, mainly selected from noble French families, and they ruled Malta by imperial decree, ostensibly caring for other noble knights coming to and fro from the Holy Land, never admitting a native-born Maltese to their magic circle. Celibacy was mandatory for them; Caravaggio was one for a while, and he always enjoyed himself better in all-male company. Meanwhile, I turn on the TV. The television guide is written in Maltese, a language long associated with the peasantry and therefore not exactly favoured by the educated classes, but lurking beneath their well-manicured English like a beating heart, as a fisherman tells me later at the pier in restful Marsaxlokk, knotting nets while I gaze at a loosely-moored boat called a Luzzo, whose prow carries the image of a huge eye designed to ward off evil. The custom persists since Phoenician times.
On the TV page, I read the headline "Fuq It." I read it again. Underneath is a list of programmes I cannot fathom, so I battle with the remote control and let it win. A monk enters my hotel room, filing the height and breadth of the TV screen. I wait, but he is not an advertisement. I had forgotten what brown robes looked like, or how devoutly Catholic Malta could be. My visitor hosts a popular television show. Malta takes its television seriously, as it does most things. Two political parties battle it out for the hearts and minds of the former British colony which is now a republic, and they each run their own television channels.
Socialist or Nationalist: that is the nub, and this month, the Nationalists returned to power. So small a population - less than 400,000 on the three islands of Malta, Gozo and Comino - guarantees that local issues are always a big deal. Tipp O'Neill's adage that all politics is local sums up the Maltese state: differences between local and national hardly exist. When I visited, the Malta Independent carried the front page story "Water Bills Could Arrive in June." The Times of Malta's top news feature advised that "Men Go Bald And Do Not Like It." Malta is a European state out of Africa, the place where St Paul was shipwrecked en route to Rome. It carries its history like a worker ant, always underlining its allegiance to Europe rather than to Africa and the Middle East, but not yet admitted to the European Union. Its myths unfold through Greek classics like the Odyssey, land settlements tell of a territory constantly under threat from one or other ruling power.
Now Malta is becoming richer, and carefully husbanding a tourist strategy based on its own rich historic sites, scuba-diving havens and friendly people, it is a society in transit, with old values beginning to collide with new. Age old landmarks, few contemporary shopping precincts. What little rowdiness features in the midst of its increasingly tourist conscious streets happens, they tell you, because of unruly Libyans on holiday from the controls of Colonel Gadaffi.
People here remember battles with the Turks as if they happened yesterday, rather than a few hundred years ago. They don't celebrate 1798 when the French came to "liberate" them, but 1800, when the British ousted the French. Only in Ireland is history such a part of the present. As a nerd, I love this history, these churches, monuments and museums. As a journalist, I note this is a minority taste. As little more than a day-trip tourist, I like the sun, the dramatic seascape, the hotel facilities and the insistence on giving good service. My whirlwind tour kept me from my bed, as well as from the casino at St Julien's, the beaches and the clubs which hopeful singles patronise. Baked in sunshine and wary of the sensual threat of prickly pear plant - huge, voluptuous cactuses growing wild and free - I sped from Mdina, a city built on the cultures of Phoenicians, Romans, Saracens, Normans, French and British to the stunning citadel fortress town on the quiet rural island of Gozo, where islanders took sanctuary during the Great Siege of 1565.
Gozo is an island of churches, each lovingly cared for as a centre of community identity. Religious festivals here can last for days, with rival groups of supporters proclaiming the virtues of Mary the Mother or Saint George as fiercely as they do soccer teams. Up Mary! I decide I am on Mary's side. I travelled with a lurking stereotype image of Malta as a quiet, rather dull post-colonial place, a rest home for elderly British expatriates straight from old B-movie Elstree studios central casting. Instead, I paused for jeeps filled with ambling tourists, eyed hotel swimming pools where French women basked disdainfully, found hand-knits so close to Aran jumpers it made no difference. Not even one John Mills-type ex-patriate appeared in my brief trip. Perhaps they were all at tea.