Original subtitles

I'm travelling the world,

exploring secrets and wonders.

This is really tight!

An adventure by land and sea

to the most fascinating places...

This is absolutely incredible.

..where I've been given special access

to significant and surprising treasures...

It's so tiny and absolutely unique.

..buried in ancient sites,

extraordinary buildings

and glorious works of art

that help to explain the story of us.

Come with me as I reveal how the past has shaped our lives.

From medieval treasures

to the Second World War,

a prehistoric temple

to Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip's romantic hideaway,

I'm exploring the fascinating island of Malta.

Its story is unique and brilliantly rich,

so I'm very lucky to get to explore it.

At only 17 miles across,

Malta may be the world's tenth smallest country,

but this tiny island is a rich layer cake of history.

Malta's strategic location,

right at the very heart of the Mediterranean,

means it's attracted friends and foes.

It's been fought over by foreign powers for thousands of years.

So, from Stone Age travellers to Crusader knights

to British royalty,

all kinds of outsiders have left their mark here,

meaning this is one of the most remarkable time capsules in the world.

With unique access to the island's treasures,

I'm exploring what the story of Malta

reveals about the world and us.

The Maltese archipelago sits between Africa and Europe,

and my first treasure exists thanks to that pivotal location.

It's a 500-year-old wonder of construction,

a huge, imposing city fortress,

a reminder that crises can spur creativity.

This is one of the most strategic spots in the whole of the island.

Control this vantage point

and you control the Grand Harbour,

and therefore, you control the island of Malta,

and beyond that, hundreds of miles worth of seaways

right across the Mediterranean.

This is Fort St Angelo,

the gateway to Malta.

The lion's share of what you see today was built

by The Order Of The Knights Of The Hospital Of Saint John.

Under their command,

this fort witnessed one of the most vicious

and game-changing conflicts in history.

The story of the knights starts far from here

in Jerusalem in the 11th century.

The Christian order was founded to defend the Holy Land

and the pilgrims who travelled there.

For 200 years, they were in the Middle East,

building a hospital in Jerusalem,

and stayed until Muslim forces took over the region

and they were kicked out.

They searched for a permanent base.

In 1530, the key power player of the day,

the Holy Roman emperor,

finally found the knights a new home -

this place.

At that point a half-ruined castle,

this could be an ideal HQ.

But there are two conditions.

Every year, the knights had to supply the emperor

with a single peregrine falcon,

and they had to promise to wage incessant war

against pirates and infidels.

The falcon was easily enough done.

As for pirates and infidels,

that was a bigger ask.

The emperor had in mind the superpower of the day,

the Ottoman Turks,

steadily expanding their empire with their eyes on Malta.

The knights had to weaponise their new base,

so they expanded outwards, beyond the castle,

constructing massive fortifications on the rocks all around.

Once secure, the knights, known as Hospitallers,

practised what they preached.

Because the knights were monks, they were celibate.

They took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience

and they were obliged to do good works.

So, they looked after the poor, the needy,

orphans and abandoned women.

Treating all patients, including Jews and Muslims,

with practices partly inspired by their time in the east.

In May 1565,

the knights had to put aside their caring duties,

mustering every ounce of their soldiering skills

because the Ottoman Turks were on the attack.

Malta was besieged...

..and Fort St Angelo was the heart of the knights' resistance.

On the 19th of May 1565,

almost 300 Ottoman ships sailed into this harbour.

The horizon was white with their sails.

And then, as the battle began,

eyewitnesses described the sea running red with blood.

It was a struggle between two superpowers

for control of the strategic island.

We're told that the Ottomans had over 40,000 men

against just 700 knights

and 8,000 soldiers.

The defenders of Malta were outnumbered four to one.

What followed was one of the bloodiest

and most ferociously contested sieges in history.

Time and time again,

the knights used incendiary devices,

basically dirty flaming bombs

that they catapulted out at the enemy Ottoman ships.

At one point when the Turks had the upper hand,

they took four headless bodies of the knights,

gashed crossed into their chests,

lashed their bodies to crucifixes

and sent them back to Fort St Angelo as a terrible message.

In retaliation, all of the Turkish prisoners were decapitated,

and their heads were used as cannonballs.

We're told that even the Maltese women and children got involved,

pouring flaming oil from the ramparts.

There was desperation and horror and suffering on both sides,

Ottoman Turks and knights alike.

After four months,

Fort St Angelo still stood firm.

The Ottoman Turks retreated.

They'd lost 30,000 men,

Malta, one third of its population.

But from the flames of destruction,

something wonderful arose.

Surviving the crisis of the Ottoman attack,

the knights were galvanised to build a splendid new city -

Valletta.

Valletta, named after the leader of the order,

Jean Parisot de la Valette,

was a bold new dream metropolis.

And with its giant secure walls,

the whole city became a fortress,

a kind of child of Fort St Angelo,

keeping the Maltese and its knights safe.

After the horrors of the siege,

the Maltese resolved never to be vulnerable again.

So, they constructed a secret subterranean world

under the streets,

and I've been tipped off there is access down there,

somewhere a bit special.

Hi. Hello.

Sorry to disturb you. I actually need to get down here.

Would you mind sitting at another table? Not at all.

It's OK. Thank you.

Sorry to disturb you.

That's great, thank you.

Thank you.

I just can't believe I've been allowed down here.

The knights and the people of Malta

realised that they had a real ally in the form of the rock

that the island itself is made of.

So, it's soft enough to carve through,

but strong enough to support huge weight.

It's perfect anti-siege engineering.

Now, the fortified city could be more self-sufficient.

Down here, there are sophisticated sanitation systems

and vaults for storing food

and huge systems like this

that would keep the population of Malta fed and watered for months.

This subterranean innovation helped keep the Maltese people safe

from disease and starvation for centuries.

Fired by the suffering of the Great Siege of Malta,

centred on Fort St Angelo.

Fort St Angelo is a wonder for me

because it reminds us that necessity really is the mother of invention

and that we should understand history from all vantage points.

My next treasure reveals a story of exile and achievement...

..because, five centuries ago,

a notorious artist on the run fled here

and produced a work that would mark a turning point

in the history of art.

Caravaggio was an Italian painter

who was born in Milan in the 16th century.

He was really a wild genius who created incredible works.

He used real people as models,

even for biblical figures...

..ushering in a naturalistic style,

kick-starting modern painting.

But for me, this particular painting

is a real wonder of Malta.

And the story of how it came to be created here on this island

is one packed with intrigue, corruption and murder.

This, Caravaggio's masterpiece,

is particularly amazing when you know its backstory.

There was a dark side

to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

He'd wounded a police officer

and he picked one drunken brawl after another.

He was tortured and talented and dangerous.

In his motherland, Italy,

he killed a well-connected Roman in a duel.

With a price on his head,

he fled south to Malta.

The knights immediately latched onto this celebrity

and admitted Caravaggio as a novice to the Order Of Saint John.

From brawler to murderer to Christian knight,

it was quite the transformation.

BELLS RING

Caravaggio was now apparently on the side of the angels,

and the knights capitalised on his presence.

In 1608, they commissioned him to paint

a grand altarpiece for this, their magnificent new cathedral.

Oh, this is absolutely incredible.

Oh.

A showcase for their Christian order.

This is a fulcrum of the knights' influence,

and trendy, turbulent, talk-of-the-town Caravaggio

was asked to paint a statement piece,

which is still here.

At the time, Caravaggio was still on the run,

still wanted for murder,

so it's extraordinary he should be asked to make a painting

for this holy place.

I'm about to see it in the flesh for the first time.

That is completely remarkable...

..because you walk in, it doesn't look as though you're looking at a painting.

It feels as though you come in and there's an open window,

and you're seeing something through it that you really shouldn't be witnessing.

In a prison yard,

an executioner is using a knife

to decapitate St John the Baptist.

A servant girl waits for the severed head with a golden platter.

Other prisoners watch in horror from a window.

They could be next.

Knowing Caravaggio's life story and his state of mind

helps you read this painting in a different way.

This doesn't just feel like an illustration of a bible story.

It feels very personal, it feels really intimate.

It's almost like photojournalism.

Caravaggio would've seen them beheaded in the world around him,

and you wonder if this painting is talking about that

or whether he's actually prefiguring his own fate.

This is the only painting that Caravaggio signed,

and where he chose to put his signature

was in the blood that's pooling out of John the Baptist's neck.

That has to say something about his mental state,

about how dark and desperate he felt while he was here.

Shortly after completing this masterpiece,

the fugitive was in trouble yet again.

Another brawl, and this time,

a high-ranking knight was severely wounded.

Caravaggio's crime was really serious,

so he was brought here to Fort St Angelo for his incarceration,

and, believe it or not,

the prison is still here.

SHE GRUNTS, LAUGHS

BREATHING HEAVILY: OK.

I'm delighted I've got access,

but I hate small, dark spaces,

so I'm slightly anxious about this.

OK.

Oh, this is horrible.

WHISPERING: Hey, look at these.

Caravaggio, being Caravaggio, had absolutely no intention

of being kept locked up down here, and somehow...

I mean, we don't know how, after a few weeks,

he managed to escape.

I mean, there's no way you could get out of here by yourself,

so he must've bribed or maybe blackmailed somebody.

What a stunt.

Caravaggio vanished from his rock-cut cell...

..and from the island of Malta.

Even though Caravaggio wasn't here,

the knights put on a kind of show trial.

They laid his robes to symbolise the man in front of this painting

and they found him guilty.

If Caravaggio had been here in person,

he'd have been beheaded.

As it was, they stripped him of his promised knighthood.

Within two years, he was found dead

in mysterious circumstances,

quite possibly the knights' last revenge.

Caravaggio's painting somehow fits

with the wonderful, complicated nature of this place,

an island that's rarely at peace,

but that also boasts a wild, dangerous beauty.

That's why, for me,

this maverick outsider's painting

is a bittersweet treasure of Malta,

a wonder created from the intense isolation of exile.

From 1813 to 1964,

Malta was a British colony.

Our next treasure is a rather surprising relic of that age.

This is a hidden wonder

with a connection to the British royal family.

The young Princess Elizabeth lived here with her new husband, Philip,

a commander in the British Navy between 1949 and 1951.

What an amazing place to get access to.

Yet to take the crown from her father, King George VI,

she could enjoy an island paradise.

Today, it's in disrepair,

barely used since the royal couple left.

It's hauntingly romantic.

This really does feel like a place trapped in time.

Empty for years, rarely filmed,

these rooms seem thick with secrets and stories.

So, why settle in Malta?

Once they were married,

Philip begged George VI to allow him to return to active service

rather than his desk job at the Admiralty,

"shuffling ships around all day," as Philip put it.

The king agreed, but on the condition

that Elizabeth didn't abandon him,

but would return from Malta to Britain from time to time.

At the centre of the Mediterranean,

Malta was an ideal base for the Royal Navy's fleet,

a command point for British interests.

Philip was stationed here and Elizabeth joined him

in time for their second wedding anniversary.

While Philip was on active service,

Elizabeth could revel in their new island home.

Oh, I love the colour of this room.

The house was lent to them by Philip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten.

There are six bedrooms, three bathrooms,

a grand hall and servants' quarters,

with separate apartments for Philip and the princess.

This is...

This is a corner where I feel a bit like I'm poking around a little bit too much.

So, this was the princess's private bathroom.

And her bedroom, with a fireplace,

very unusual in Malta at the time.

It's said that she loved this house

precisely because it's that -

a house, not a palace.

A home offering a rare chance to live as a private person

rather than a princess.

An opportunity to experience a taste of ordinary life.

Well, relatively ordinary.

These are the servants' stairs.

She kept pretty well-staffed.

So, she had a footman and a lady-in-waiting and a detective

and 40 wardrobes of clothes.

But it wasn't all glamour and privilege.

She did perform some royal duties while she was here -

touring military installations and cutting ceremonial ribbons

and visiting nursery schools -

but she also got to be just an ordinary woman a lot of her days.

She would have lunch with officers' wives

and, some day, even get her hair done in beauty salons,

and we're told that, sometimes,

she even handled her own money.

One of the duke's great friends and an equerry

said she only spent 10% of her time here being a princess.

Less time as a princess seemed to suit Elizabeth.

Leaving for a trip to London in 1949,

she was physically upset.

Lady Mountbatten, who was travelling with her,

said that as she left, she had a tear in her eye

and a lump in her throat,

and it was like putting a bird back into a very small cage.

In Britain, Elizabeth discovered she was pregnant with her second child.

Princess Anne was born in August 1950.

As soon as possible, the couple were back in Malta.

The place had become a haven,

and this time, they stayed even longer.

But this private paradise existence couldn't last forever.

After just a few months,

duty called the princess back to Britain,

this time for good.

Her father's health was failing

and Elizabeth had to fill in for the king more and more.

So, sadly, in 1951,

she had to say a final farewell to this house that she so loved.

It's an extraordinary house

with an extraordinary past,

a treasure because it encapsulates what an island can offer -

sanctuary and opportunity.

For Philip, a springboard to the world,

and for Elizabeth, a place of refuge

where she could be who she wanted to be.

My next treasure helped change the course of history.

Despite this rather unpromising entrance,

there's somewhere down here that shaped all of our lives.

A network of tunnels whose nerve centre was the Lascaris War Rooms.

These are the hidden headquarters for a secret

mission in World War II that would prove to be a major turning

point in the battle for Nazi occupied Europe.

Because the Germans knew that Malta was a prize they wanted to take.

A small, but crucial Allied foothold in the Mediterranean.

So the Nazis decided to attack.

The Italian fascists, their new allies,

began to bomb Malta just 24 hours after they joined the war.

What had been an island sanctuary had become a trap.

From 1940 to 1942,

15,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Malta...

..and Paradise had become a living hell.

Malta fast-became the most bombed place on Earth.

This is just another raid.

No less terrible and no more terrible than over 1,000 others.

Once more, the Rock of Malta would provide a salvation.

Tunnels built almost 400 years earlier by the Crusader Knights

of St John, where expanded to create air raid shelters.

Ah! Oh, God.

It's really damp, it's really close.

The British brought in miners from South Wales and Yorkshire,

along with the Royal Engineers to help make these a temporary

sanctuary for the Maltese people.

Golly, they just go on, it just goes on and on down here.

Once finished, these could house close on the entire

population of Malta.

So you can still see these little, erm... Remnants of life.

So kind of bottles left on the ground and these little shelves...

Actually, that looks like tiles in there, is it?

I don't know if they tried to make a little bathroom here,

or a kind of kitchen or something?

Oh, look at that.

I don't know if you can see that, it's a Virgin Mary

that somebody's just carved into the rock.

That's so sad, so it's like the stone and her spirit

that's going to keep them alive down here.

A family lived in each room.

The tunnels became streets.

So this must be a crossroads.

Ah, OK, that makes sense.

So I'd heard that they made the street system

so it kind of mirrored the city above.

Look, that's got the name on it.

Oh, my God, look at that.

So St Lucia's, so this must be... There's a St Lucia Street up there.

Oh, there's something so touching about that.

It's almost like this, you know, it's a kind of parallel world

they're trying to create down here.

Oh, what suffering...

..and what bravery to carry on life in this way.

By the time the raids came to an end in November 1942,

the city of Valletta's population had fallen

from 21,000 to just 6,000.

The air raids might have stopped, but the war was far from over.

The top-secret area of the underground network,

the war rooms, could now come into its own.

By May 1943, the Nazis had been driven out of North Africa.

And for the allies, the next obvious place to attack was Sicily.

From Sicily, the allies could exert pressure on Fascist Italy

and northward through Europe.

But they knew that the Germans would realise that.

They had somehow to persuade them otherwise.

Sicily was such an obvious target that the Brits attempted all kinds

of ingenious plans to divert the German's attention elsewhere.

The most infamous aimed to throw the focus to Sardinia.

A corpse, a real corpse was dressed as a Royal Marine.

And the body was planted with fake papers, identifying the man

as William Martin, an officer who'd been lost at sea

in a fictitious air crash near Gibraltar.

Chained to the body was a briefcase containing more fake

documents, hinting that after Tunisia the allies

were going to invade Sardinia.

British intelligence rigged it so that the body was washed up on

a Spanish beach where it was handed over to the German authorities.

It was a great idea, and it's a great story.

But sadly, this ruse had little direct effect,

other than to raise the alarm... And the stakes.

With the enemy's attention focused on Sicily more than ever,

the allies were under extreme pressure

as they planned their invasion.

So they sent troops and officers from Britain, the US and Canada,

a massive international effort, all to be commanded from Malta.

The whole thing would be run from this room.

The Allied supreme commander, General Dwight Eisenhower,

arrived to direct the operation and he sat right here.

What followed, as the allies prepared to take Sicily,

was one of the largest amphibious operations ever attempted,

with more troops than D-Day.

Operation Husky was launched in July 1943.

It all began just before dawn on the 10th.

Over the next three days, over 3,000 boats

transporting 150,000 ground troops...

..flanked by 4,000 aircraft in the skies...

..made their way towards Sicily.

They were met by over 260,000 enemy access troops.

38 days of brutal, bitter fighting followed.

Finally, the allies won out.

Italy's leader, Mussolini, was deposed and arrested.

Hitler lost a key collaborator.

The allies gained a chance to reclaim Europe.

From this very room...

Albeit with close on 25,000 casualties,

the allies had taken their first major step

in the liberation of Europe.

These war rooms made history and are to be treasured.

Operations masterminded here saved Malta from further horrors

impacting all our lives.

And there's a wonderful coda to this story...

Malta's strategic location meant that everyone living here

was in jeopardy, but the entire population rose heroically

to the challenge.

And in recognition of their continuous bravery,

despite repeated aerial attack and besiegement,

in 1942 the George Cross was awarded to the whole island,

Britain's highest award for civilian bravery.

And that is still emblazoned on the Maltese flag today.

My next treasure is an extraordinary monument

to the human spirit...

..a boat ride away on Malta's sister island, Gozo.

Over 7,000 years ago,

women and men packed onto flimsy reed boats

and ventured out to this island

to try to make a new life for themselves.

They came from what's now Sicily and North Africa

in search of new opportunities.

They must've been curious or desperate,

I mean, certainly, with an incredible spiritual adventure,

to brave these waters in a small boat,

not knowing what lay ahead of them.

In their new island home,

they created something remarkable -

Stone Age wonders,

evidence of the power of human collaboration,

the bedrock of civilisation.

This is Ggantija Temple.

It was built over 5,500 years ago,

and it's one of the oldest freestanding structures

in the world.

Incredibly, raised 1,000 years before Stonehenge

and the Great Pyramids of ancient Egypt.

The word Ggantija comes from ggant,

the Maltese for "giant".

There's a local legend that this place was built

in a single day and a night

by a giantess who - wait for it -

was nursing a baby at her breast as she worked.

I'm not surprised they tell stories like this

because some of these stones are over five metres long

and they weigh over 50 tonnes.

There's no evidence of slavery from this culture.

It seems that, in a collective effort,

they rolled the stones here.

And the complex art

this island community created together and shared

celebrates the natural world...

..honouring their connection to the earth,

the sea and the sky.

These temples are orientated to the movement of stars,

to the rising and setting of the sun,

so they must be something to do with the progress of time,

with beginnings and ends,

with death and regeneration.

Basically, with the stories and mysteries of life itself.

Incredibly, there are 42 more megalithic sites

on this tiny archipelago.

My next treasure is one of them.

It's particularly special

because it's a mirror image of this temple,

but under the ground,

and special for me

because I've wanted to get access to this hidden wonder

beneath the city streets of Malta

all my adult life.

I have to say, I am properly hyped about this

because this place is truly unique.

There is nothing else quite like it from this time

anywhere in the world.

It's called Hypogeum,

literally, the under-earth place.

This was only discovered by accident in 1902

when builders were drilling for a while here.

This is one of the best preserved subterranean Stone Age sites

in the world.

This really is a labyrinth down here.

It's actually making me quite nervous

because I know there are at least 34 different chambers

to get lost in.

And its sophisticated shapes should look familiar.

This is a kind of underworld version of the temples above.

So, you've got doors and windows

and that beautiful corbelled roof has got a supportive beam

which, of course, it doesn't need because it's underground here,

but it's engineering that's being used

to prove that this is a kind of twin

of what lies above the earth.

This was clearly built by the same people

as the Ggantija Temple above ground,

but the Hypogeum is even more impressive.

Three stories deep,

reaching ten metres into the earth.

It would've been the most massive effort

to hackle this out of the rural rock.

I don't know if you can see there.

These are the marks left by the tools that they used.

They were kind of prehistoric pickaxe

made of horn or antler.

And what you've got to think is that this was a time

when life was really, really hard.

So, you didn't know if there was going to be a disease

or animal attack or crop failure,

so death was always just around the corner.

So, to take time out to make this

tells me that what happened down here

really, really mattered to the people of the island.

Because this is where those Stone Age islanders

tried to make sense of the world

and their place in it.

This place is magical for so many reasons,

but this is surely has to be one of the stars.

This beautiful figurine was found down here.

This is a copy of the original

because the original was made over four-and-a-half-thousand years ago.

We don't know who she is.

We don't know whether she's a goddess or a priestess

or just an ordinary woman

or, because she's lying in this perfect, peaceful sleep,

whether what she represents is death.

Now, she was found in that pit down there,

mixed up with a huge number of human bones,

because what this place was used for

was a giant burial ground.

As many as 7,000 people

were buried here over time.

Women, men and children,

all in the same place.

There are these incredible red symbols everywhere.

They're on the ceilings, on the walls,

and they're very faded now.

It's so frustrating cos we don't know what they mean,

but the people here also covered the bones with red ochre,

so this must be something to do with blood.

It must be something to do with life and death.

And I think they must've understood the magic of the cycle of life,

that we're all part of a bigger matrix,

that material never really disappears,

it just takes a new form.

Although most of the bone evidence has disintegrated,

I'm incredibly fortunate to have access

to one of the few intact skulls excavated from the Hypogeum,

belonging to a 25-year-old male.

It is an amazing state of preservation.

I have to say, it is such a privilege

to be face to face with someone from this remarkable prehistoric world

and to just imagine what those eyes saw.

This was an individual,

a young man who chose to work together with those around him

to pioneer new ideas

and who chose to be buried with them, too.

The fact that they chose mass burials

surely says that togetherness

hugely mattered to them,

perhaps above all else.

For me, these Stone Age treasures are all beyond wonderful

because they're a product of women and men collaborating,

forming a society,

the beginning of civilisation itself.

So much has happened on this small island across the last 8,000 years.

From the wildness of prehistoric temples

to secret operations in World War II,

from macho Crusader knights

to the delights of island life,

this has been a place of salvation and of siege.

But it's also important because it's a reminder

that no man or woman is an island,

that we're all the products of interaction and shared inspirations

and pleasures and pains,

and that, for me, is why Malta is a wonder -

because it's a microcosm of the world

and of the human experience.

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