Leaving the Bougainville in the harbor of Porto Empedocle, we headed up the hill to Agrigento, which in its heyday was known as Akragas, after one of the rivers that ran past the town. In Akragas’ glory years in the 5th Century BCE, the city gobbled its neighbors, controlled the middle section of Sicily, held […]

So there came the morning when Kathy tested positive for COVID, followed by a frantic hour that resulted in our separation for nearly two weeks. I went off on the trip without her, and she was condemned to days and days of coughing, confinement, and hotel food. My digs were rather more posh, and the […]

There are a surprisingly large number of Michelin-starred restaurants on Malta. Despite my devotion to gastronomy, I’d never eaten at a restaurant with a Michelin star, and I thought it was about time I did. So even though I knew that Kathy and I were going to be facing a week of very large and […]

So now we get to the chief reason I wanted to go to Malta in the first place: to view the gigantic stone monuments found on the island. There is nothing like them anywhere else. They were built out of the local limestone roughly 3500-2500 BCE— before the Pyramids, before Stonehenge. They are right smack […]