The Excavation
Where the ground floor becomes the third basement.
Most destinations build up. Malta, never one to be limited, also builds down, and the excavation is where the island reveals its true depths.
Peer over the hoarding into a pit the size of a piazza and watch the layers of history come out by the skipload: limestone laid down over millennia, removed in an afternoon to make room for parking. There is something humbling about it. Where else can you stand at street level and look down three storeys into bedrock that took the planet several million years to assemble?
The soundtrack is unforgettable: the rock breaker’s patient hammering, audible from the next village, setting every window in the neighbourhood gently buzzing in sympathy. Time your visit for the moment a party wall develops an interesting new crack; the excitement is contagious, particularly for the people who live next to it.
Bring a camera. The exposed strata, the groundwater seeping in, the lone surveyor contemplating the abyss. It is the closest the islands come to landscape painting.
Untouched? Quite the opposite. Thoroughly, enthusiastically touched.
