Victoria, Gozo

Where it sits. Victoria stands on the central hill of Gozo, almost exactly in the middle of the island, so that every road on Gozo eventually runs into it. About 6,500 people live here, which makes it the largest settlement on the island and, by any mainland standard, a small country town that happens to hold a cathedral, a basilica, two opera houses, a citadel, the island's law courts, its hospital and its bus terminus. Almost nobody who lives on Gozo calls it Victoria. The old name is Rabat — the Arabic-derived word for the settlement that grew outside a fortress — and it is what appears on bus destination boards, in conversation, and on the town's own street signs in Maltese.

How it got the other name. The town was renamed on 10 June 1887 to mark Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, by proclamation of the British colonial administration. The gesture was official rather than popular, and the two names have coexisted ever since, with Victoria used in documents and Rabat used by everyone else. The layering runs deeper than the name: the hill has been occupied since the Bronze Age, held a Punic and then a Roman settlement called Gaulos, and carried a medieval castle whose walls were rebuilt into the bastioned Cittadella that still crowns the summit.

It-Tokk and the streets below the rock. The social centre of town is Independence Square, universally known as It-Tokk, a wide triangular space that fills each morning with a market of clothes, produce, lace and household goods and empties again by early afternoon. Its most striking building is the semicircular Banca Giuratale, built in 1733 under Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena as the seat of the town's civic administration and still used as the local council offices. From It-Tokk, Republic Street runs the length of the town, while a tangle of narrow lanes drops southeast into the old quarter around St George's Square, a small stone-paved piazza laid with pale slabs and ringed by cafés whose tables spill across it in the evening.

Two churches, two clubs, two opera houses. St George's Basilica in the old quarter is Gozo's oldest parish church, rebuilt between 1672 and 1678 and then lined over the following centuries with marble and gilding until it earned the nickname the golden basilica; its bronze canopy over the high altar is modelled on Bernini's baldachin in Rome. Up in the Cittadella stands the Cathedral of the Assumption, designed by the Maltese architect Lorenzo Gafà and built between 1697 and 1711. The cathedral's dome was never constructed for lack of funds, so in 1739 the painter Antonio Manuele produced a trompe-l'œil ceiling showing exactly the dome that should have been there — a flat vault that convinces almost everyone who walks in and looks up. The rivalry between the two churches has structured town life for a century and a half through their band clubs, La Stella and Leone, both founded in the 1860s, each of which maintains its own theatre: the Astra and the Aurora, which between them stage a full opera season every autumn in a town of a few thousand people.

What else is worth the walk. Villa Rundle Gardens, laid out in 1914–15 and named after Sir Leslie Rundle, then Governor of Malta, provide the only substantial shade in the centre — palms, ficus, a bandstand and a small aviary. Il-Ħaġar museum on St George's Square holds paintings, silver and the older titular statues of the basilica, and its upper terrace looks straight down onto the square. The climb to the Cittadella from It-Tokk takes about five minutes up a ramped stone approach; the ramparts return a full circuit of the island, from the Xewkija rotunda in the southeast to Ta' Pinu's campanile in the northwest, with Comino and Malta visible on a clear day.

Getting there and timing. Every Gozo bus route terminates at the station just off Republic Street, so Victoria works as a base even without a car: Marsalforn, Xlendi, Ramla and Dwejra are all fifteen to twenty-five minutes away. From the Mġarr ferry terminal it is a ten-minute drive or a twenty-minute bus ride. Mornings belong to the market and to the town's own life; late afternoon light rakes across the citadel walls and is the reason photographers wait. The town is busiest during the two June and July parish feasts, when the streets are hung with damask and lit with strings of bulbs, and quietest on winter weekday afternoons, when the shutters come down and the lanes belong to cats. Streets in the old quarter are steep, stepped and stone-paved, so mobility on wheels is limited outside the main square.