St. Catherine's Monastery of Zejtun

Where it sits. Żejtun stands on a low ridge in the south of Malta, roughly midway between the Grand Harbour and Marsaxlokk Bay, with clear sightlines down to both. It is a city rather than a village in Maltese usage — traditionally styled Città Beland, a title conferred in 1797 by Ferdinand von Hompesch, the last Grand Master of the Order to rule Malta. Before that it was Casale Santa Caterina, after the patron saint. The population is close to 12,800. The name comes from the Semitic root for olive and olive oil, and the surrounding fields were dense with olive groves in Punic and Roman times; the oil economy of this district is one of the best-documented in the central Mediterranean.

Two medieval cores. Żejtun is not one settlement but two grown together. The old nuclei of Bisqallin and Ħal Bisbut still keep their pre-modern street plans: irregular lanes barely wide enough for a car, blind corners, flat-roofed houses with stone balconies and heavy wooden doors, and small open squares that appear without warning. Walking them is the reason to come. Over the centuries Żejtun's territory shed hamlet after hamlet to independent parishes — Marsaxlokk among them — but the mother-town retained an unusual density of chapels, wayside niches and eighteenth-century townhouses. Bir id-Deheb, Ħal Tmin and Tal-Barrani on the outskirts were all once separate hamlets.

St Gregory's, and what was found in the walls. On the edge of town, beside the cemeteries and commanding a view over Marsaxlokk harbour and St Thomas Bay, stands St Catherine's Old Church, universally called St Gregory's after the procession held there on the first Wednesday after Easter. It was raised in the late fifteenth century on the site of an earlier chapel that had been one of Malta's small number of mother churches, and it is among the most important surviving late-medieval buildings on the islands. In 1969 restoration work opened a concealed passage running within the thickness of its walls; inside were human remains, widely associated with the Ottoman raid of 1614, when a Turkish force landed at St Thomas Bay and swept inland through Żejtun. Whatever the true explanation, the discovery gave the building a hold on the local imagination that it has never lost.

The new parish church. The present parish church of St Catherine of Alexandria, begun in 1692, is a work of Lorenzo Gafà — the architect of the Mdina cathedral and the defining figure of the Maltese Baroque. Its high drum and dome dominate the approach from every direction, and the interior repays a slow look: a coherent, austere late-seventeenth-century space rather than a jumble of later refits. The titular feast, celebrated in mid-June, is one of the more serious festas in the south, with two rival band clubs, elaborate street decoration and heavy pyrotechnics.

Roman oil, under a school. Between 1961 and 1964 the construction of the local secondary school uncovered a substantial rural villa complex, now known as the Żejtun Roman villa. It was a working agricultural establishment rather than a seaside retreat: the excavated remains include pressing floors and collection vats for olive oil, storage areas and evidence of occupation running from the Punic period through the Roman centuries. The site lies within the school grounds and has been progressively conserved and opened for guided access, which makes it one of the few places in Malta where a visitor can stand in a Roman farmyard that is still surrounded by the fields it worked.

What the town is like, and how to use it. Żejtun is emphatically not a resort. There is no beach, no seafront and very little that is arranged for visitors, which is precisely its value: it is a working southern Maltese town of bakeries, band clubs, hardware shops and cats asleep in doorways. Good, cheap food is easy to find — this is pastizzi and ftira territory rather than tasting menus. The best approach is on foot from the main square, Misraħ Karlu Diacono, then at random into Bisqallin. Buses from Valletta take about half an hour and services also link to Marsaskala and Marsaxlokk, both within a few kilometres. Driving in is possible but the old lanes punish anything larger than a small hatchback; park on the periphery. Spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons; the June feast is the town at full volume, and the Easter-week processions, including the Wednesday walk to St Gregory's, are among the older surviving traditions on the island.