Malta, the baroque harbour that just got its first US flight

We had always reached Malta the long way. A change in Rome or Frankfurt, a whole day spent for three hours in the air, the island filed under someday. From this summer there is a shorter line. On 7 June Delta flew the first nonstop service between the United States and Malta in decades, New York to Luqa, and the map quietly redrew itself.

The service is modest and deliberate. A Boeing 767 three times a week, Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, running through late October and then folding away for the winter. The inaugural left with more than nine seats in ten filled, which is the figure airlines actually watch. Americans were already Malta's highest-spending visitors, their arrivals up 47 percent on the year before, so the route reads less as a gamble than as a confirmation of something the numbers had been saying for a while.

What waits at the other end is one of the most concentrated pieces of baroque theatre in the Mediterranean. Valletta was laid out in 1566 by the Knights of St John, fresh from surviving the Great Siege, on a spit of rock between two deep harbours. They cut it from Globigerina limestone, a stone the colour of honey that turns gold in a low sun, and they built it to be held, so the whole city still sits inside its own walls.

A place raised by soldier-monks to hold off an empire, and it greets you now like a fortress that decided, late in life, to become beautiful.

The set pieces reward a short stay. St John's Co-Cathedral keeps Caravaggio's Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, the largest canvas he ever painted and the only one he signed, hung in the room it was made for. The Upper Barrakka Gardens look straight down onto the Grand Harbour and the fortified towns across the water, close enough to hear the noon gun. When the lanes of the capital tire you, a ferry and a few minutes carry you to Mdina, the walled hill town the Maltese call the silent city, where cars are mostly forbidden and the alleys hold their quiet like a held breath.

There is a table to it too. The harbour town of Marsaxlokk still sends its painted luzzu boats out at dawn, and the Sunday market there sells the catch a few metres from where it lands. Rabbit, the island's stubborn national dish, comes stewed slow in wine and bay. None of it is grand, and that is the point.

We would not wait. The route is seasonal and the island is small, and both facts have a way of filling quickly once the word travels. Go while the flight is still new and Valletta still feels like a secret kept behind its walls.