Proserpina or Proserpine is an ancient Roman goddess whose cult, myths and mysteries were combined from those of Libera, an early Roman goddess of wine. In Greek she is known as Persephone and her mother is Demeter, goddesses of grain and agriculture. The originally Roman goddess Libera was daughter of the agricultural goddess Ceres and wife to Liber, god of wine and freedom. In 204 BCE, a new "Greek-style" cult to Ceres and Proserpina as "Mother and Maiden" was imported from southern Italy, along with Greek priestesses to serve it, and was installed in Libera and Ceres' temple on Rome's Aventine Hill. The new cult and its priesthood were actively promoted by Rome's religious authorities as morally desirable for respectable Roman women, and may have partly subsumed the temple's older, native cult to Ceres, Liber and Libera; but the new rites seem to have functioned alongside the old, rather than replaced them.
Mdina, also known by its Italian-language titles Città Vecchia and Città Notabile, is a fortified city in the Northern Region of Malta which served as the island's capital from antiquity to the medieval period. The city is still confined within its walls, and has a population of just under 300, but it is contiguous with the town of Rabat, which takes its name from the Arabic word for suburb, and has a population of over 11,000.
Mtarfa is a small town in the Northern Region of Malta, with a population of 2,572 as of March 2014. It was considered to be a suburb of Rabat until 2000, when it became a separate local council.
Emmanuel Magri was a Maltese ethnographer, archaeologist and writer.
The Castellania, also known as the Castellania Palace, is a former courthouse and prison in Valletta, Malta. It was built by the Order of St. John between 1757 and 1760, on the site of an earlier courthouse which had been built in 1572.
The decade of the 1610s in archaeology involved some significant events, some of which are described here.
Antonio Annetto Caruana, also known as A. A. Caruana, was a Maltese archaeologist and author.
The Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Paul, commonly known as St Paul's Cathedral or the Mdina Cathedral, is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Mdina, Malta, dedicated to St. Paul the Apostle. The cathedral was founded in the 12th century, and according to tradition it stands on the site of where Roman governor Publius met St. Paul following his shipwreck on Malta. The original cathedral was severely damaged in the 1693 Sicily earthquake, so it was dismantled and rebuilt in the Baroque style to a design of the Maltese architect Lorenzo Gafà between 1696 and 1705. The cathedral is regarded as Gafà's masterpiece.
The Domus Romana, stylized as the Domvs Romana, is a ruined Roman-era house located on the boundary between Mdina and Rabat, Malta. It was built in the 1st century BC as an aristocratic town house (domus) within the Roman city of Melite. In the 11th century, a Muslim cemetery was established on the remains of the domus.
San Pawl Milqi is the ruin of a Roman-period agricultural villa and a pagan temple, the most extensive to have ever been unearthed in Malta. A christian church was built on site based on the pseudo-history and religious doctrine that the site has biblical connections. On site of a present chapel was a temple dedicated to the Greek God Apollo and a Roman villa. According to religious tradition the villa is where St. Publius, the governor and first bishop of Malta, welcomed St. Paul after his shipwreck.
Greeks have a long presence in Malta, which may lead back to ancient times. The archipelago was intensely Hellenized beginning in the 3rd century BC, a process which intertwined with the Christianization of Malta after the 1st century AD. The Byzantine presence was overturned by the Arab conquest of 870, and the surviving Greek community was Islamified. Maltese Christianity of the Byzantine Rite was only preserved in some parts of the country, being especially important in Gozo. These groups formed the basis for a local branch of the Orthodox Church, revived following Norman conquest in the 1120s. Although marginalized by Catholicism, which became the dominant faith, a Greek-speaking Orthodox community survived into the 15th century.
The Auberge d'Italie is an auberge in Valletta, Malta. It was built at various stages in the late 16th century to house knights of the Order of Saint John from the langue of Italy, and it originally had a Mannerist design by Girolamo Cassar and several other architects. The building continued to be modified throughout the course of the 17th century, with the last major renovation being carried out in the 1680s during the magistracy of Gregorio Carafa, giving the building a Baroque character.
The Kordin Temples are a group of megalithic temples on Corradino Heights in Paola, Malta. The temples were inhabited from pre-history, by Phoenicians and then by the Greeks and Roman periods. In the 17th century the site belonged to Giovanni Francesco Abela. He had excavated several sites in the whereabouts, and had his country residence in the area. He had originally planned to write his will to the Order, but eventually left his villa, that was used as Malta's first museum, known as Museo di San Giacomo, and the surrounding lands to the Jesuits. The land still belonged to the Jesuits, until their expulsion in the 18th century by the Order when all their land and property was taken by the treasury. The site was excavated during the Order of St. John on the order of Grand Master Manuel Pinto da Fonseca by archeologist Gio Antonio Barbaro. The temples were then extensively excavated by Sir Themistocles Zammit during the British period.
Is-Suq tal-Belt, also known as the Covered Market, is a 19th-century market hall located in Valletta, Malta. It is notable for being the first building in Malta to be constructed mostly of iron. The building was severely damaged in World War II, and the rebuilding was insensitive to the original structure. Further alterations were made in later decades, and the market began to decline in the 1970s. An attempt to rebrand it as a shopping arcade known as Ixtri Malti in the 1980s was unsuccessful. The market continued to decline until it was renovated in 2016–17, and reopened as a food market in January 2018.
The Monte di Pietà, formerly known as the Monte di Sant'Anna, is a charitable institution which lends money to those in need at modest interest rates, on the security of gold, silver or other precious articles given in pawn. In Malta the institution was set up in 1598, was known in the British period as the Public Pawn-Brokery, and it is still in operation today as part of the Inland Revenue Department. Since 1773, the Monte di Pietà has been housed in a 16th-century building in Valletta.
Melite or Melita was an ancient city located on the site of present-day Mdina and Rabat, Malta. It started out as a Bronze Age settlement, which developed into a city called Maleth under the Phoenicians, and became the administrative centre of the island. The city fell to the Roman Republic in 218 BC, and it remained part of the Roman and later the Byzantine Empire until 870 AD, when it was captured and destroyed by the Aghlabids. The city was then rebuilt and renamed Medina, giving rise to the present name Mdina. It remained Malta's capital city until 1530.
The Temple of Apollo was a Roman temple in the city of Melite, in modern Mdina, Malta. It was dedicated to Apollo, the god of the sun and music. The temple was built in the 2nd century AD, and it overlooked a semi-circular theatre. The temple's ruins were discovered in the 18th century, and many architectural fragments were dispersed among private collections or reworked into new sculptures. Parts of the temple's crepidoma still exist, having been rediscovered in 2002.
Malta was ruled by the Byzantine Empire, from the time of the Byzantine conquest of Sicily in 535-6 to 869-870, when the islands were occupied by Arabs. Evidence for the three centuries of Byzantine rule in Malta is very limited, and at times ambiguous. Historians theorise that Byzantine Malta was exposed to the same phenomena affecting the Central Mediterranean, namely a considerable influx of Greek settlers and Hellenic culture, administrative changes brought about by the reorganisation of Sicily along the lines of a Byzantine theme, and significant naval activity in the Mediterranean following the rise of Islam.
The remains of an unidentified Punic building exist incorporated into several properties in Żurrieq, Malta. They include a well-preserved structure commonly known as the Punic Tower or the Żurrieq Tower which is found inside the private garden of the Domus Curialis, the house of the town's archpriest, and which is the most substantial surviving example of Punic architecture on the island.
