Rabat, Malta

Where it sits. Rabat spreads across the same central plateau as Mdina, immediately south and west of the walled city and separated from it only by the old ditch. The two were a single place until the ninth century, and the split is legible on the ground: Mdina keeps the defensible tip of the ridge, Rabat holds everything the walls left outside. With around eleven thousand residents, it is a working town rather than a museum piece — a parish church with a busy square, a bus terminus, greengrocers, a school run, and a Saturday market — which is why many people who come for Mdina end up preferring the hour they spend here. The ground beneath is honeycombed. Rabat sits over one of the largest concentrations of rock-cut tombs and catacombs in the central Mediterranean.

Roman city, Christian suburb. Roman Melite covered both towns, and the boundary is marked by the Domvs Romana, the excavated townhouse just outside Mdina's gate whose mosaic floors are the finest surviving Roman work on the islands. Because Roman law forbade burial inside the pomerium, the dead went outside the walls, into what is now Rabat: the St Paul's and St Agatha's complexes, along with dozens of smaller hypogea found under houses and gardens, were cut between roughly the third and eighth centuries. The town's identity, though, rests on the shipwreck narrative in Acts, which places Paul on Malta for three months in about AD 60. Tradition set his lodging in a cave here, and the Church of St Paul was raised over it, with the Wignacourt college of chaplains attached alongside.

What you actually see today. The centre is Parish Square, dominated by the seventeenth-century church of St Paul, whose reconstruction was largely paid for by the noblewoman Cosmana Navarra and designed by Francesco Buonamici. Steps beside it drop into the grotto. Around the corner, the Wignacourt Museum stacks four layers into one ticket: Baroque galleries upstairs, then the grotto, then a catacomb, then air-raid shelters hacked out of the rock in 1940. The Augustinian church on Triq Sant'Agata, built by Girolamo Cassar in 1571, tested the barrel-vaulted plan he would reuse in Valletta. The Dominican priory nearby, in the order's hands since the fifteenth century, supplied cloister interiors for the first season of Game of Thrones.

The town underneath. Two catacomb complexes are open on the same street. The St Paul's group is the larger, an archaeological park of some thirty separate hypogea spread beneath two thousand square metres, with the round rock-cut agape tables where families ate commemorative meals beside their dead — a form found on Malta and almost nowhere else. The St Agatha's complex, run by the Missionary Society of St Paul, adds a frescoed crypt whose painted saints range from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and a small museum of coins, fossils and Roman glass above ground. Both are cool at any season, both involve steep stairs, and both illustrate how thoroughly the soft globigerina under Rabat was carved out.

Saqqajja and the edges. At the top of the town, Saqqajja Hill flattens into a belvedere with a view south over terraced fields toward Dingli. This is the finishing straight of the bareback horse races held every 29 June, the second act of the Mnarja harvest festival that begins the night before in the woods at Buskett. Below the square, Howard Gardens fill the slope between Rabat and Mdina's ditch with pines, aloes and benches — the quickest cool-off on a hot afternoon. Rabat is also the road head for the west: the Buskett woodland, Verdala Palace, the cart ruts at Misraħ Għar il-Kbir and the Dingli cliffs are all within four kilometres.

Practical texture. The town's other reputation is edible. The bar on Saqqajja Square has been selling pastizzi — flaky pastry parcels of ricotta or mushy peas — for generations, and the queue at seven in the morning is mostly builders and bus drivers rather than visitors. Several bakeries still sell ftira, the flat sourdough loaf, filled with tuna, capers and olives. Prices across the board run below Sliema and Valletta levels.

Getting there and timing. Buses 51, 52 and 53 from Valletta reach the Rabat terminus in around 35 minutes; routes 181 and 186 come up from the south of the island. Driving is straightforward and parking exists on the approach roads, which is why most people bound for Mdina park here. The archaeological sites are indoors and cool, making Rabat one of the better options in high summer, while the surrounding countryside is at its greenest between December and April. Heritage Malta's multi-site pass covers both the catacombs and the Domvs Romana; the church sites are free but ask for modest dress. Allow half a day to combine Rabat with Mdina properly, and note that most museums here close by five in the afternoon, earlier than the restaurants inside the walls.