As for me, I had come in hopes of lightening a heart made heavy by the poor health of a family member. I was in the right place.
As I made my way around Gozo (with Malta and Comino, the three inhabited islands of the archipelago’s seven) I savored each instant. The isle’s brilliant colors and odd geometry, both natural and man-made, kept me fully absorbed in the here and now. The names of the places I visited had a Lear-like lyrical quality: Xwejni, Calypso’s Cave, and Ggantija.
Moments off the 20-minute ferry from Malta, my companions and I rolled along a dirt road through someone’s farm. We plowed through a field ablaze in shades of gold, with wild fennel, cape sorrel, marigolds, and mimosas all waving their yellow blooms.
Rattling down the steep side of a glacial gash in the earth, I saw the remains of a Roman aqueduct far below, cushioned by velvety green foliage. The end of the road was a turquoise slit of Mediterranean in the cliff face, in which a lone boat was anchored, with a single swimmer slicing through the water.
Gozo’s fiord-like ravines are but one of the landscape’s distinctive geological features. Others include a dramatic, massive natural arch, known as the Azure Window, an “inland sea’’ that is connected to the Mediterranean by a natural passage, and a vast network of caves. John Schembri, head of geography at the University of Malta, later told me that these are the result of Gozo’s unique ground surface, a combination of limestone above blue clay, riddled with fault lines, and the effects of erosion.
The Azure Window is a monument to the forces of nature and time. The rock arch reaches more than 150 feet high. Each of its two supporting columns is a hefty 120 feet wide, mounted by a 300-foot ledge. Its “window’’ is almost the size of a football field.
