Day 16 From Mosta to Rabat to Sliema

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Today we are going to do a bit of catching up places we have missed on previous days. We had a good day but both our cameras batteries went flat today even though they were showing full charge before we left home. Maybe got something to do with all the flash photography today.

We firstly caught the bus to Mosta Dome, which has the third largest unsupported dome in the world. This local church is certainly something to see as the dome is enormous. Like the other churches we have seen, the internal decoration is rich in red and gold.

The most amazing thing about this church is that it probably should have been destroyed during the war. During an air raid in 1942, a bomb pierced the dome and landed in the church below without exploding. Two other bombs also bounced off the dome without exploding as well during the same raid. They have a replica of the bomb on display here.

After Mosta we then headed back to Rabat to see St Pauls Catacombs, a site that was closed a couple of days before. We are so pleased we went back to look at these things.

They date back to around the beginning of the first millennium and are a series intersecting tunnels and niches honeycombed into the rock. There is space for over 1000 bodies to be placed in them and graves have been carved into the rock to place the bodies of the deceased. They have been carved so the head fits like a there is a pillow. A lot of the spaces are for families and there are also small niches carved into the walls for children and babies.

The total area is over 2000 square metres although maybe only a quarter of that is open to the public. An amazing area below ground level showing how the Romans in particular disposed of their dead.

After that, we went back to St Pauls Church where there is a grotto (cave) beneath the church that St Paul stayed in after he was shipwrecked on Malta. The grotto was also used as a prison by the Romans prior to Paul coming to the area.

We then travelled back to the coast and got off the bus at Msida, a bay around Marsamxett Harbour. We then walked around from Msida to Sliema via Gzira admiring the billions of dollars of yachts that are moored here. Oh, how the other half live. Quite a lot of walking today once again.

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