Malta is an archipelago blessed with natural beauty, fertile soil, strategic location, fresh air, sea breezes, working infrastructure, membership in the EU, and a peaceful pace of life.

Most people associate Malta with the

 "Knights of Malta", ancient fortresses, significant meetings of world leaders. The Malta Conference in 1945 included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, members of the USA/UK military, intelligence and diplomatic hierarchy; held before the Treaty of Yalta. The Malta Summit: a meeting between then President George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1989, at which an agreement toward a  proclaimed "New World Order" was declared, signaled the end of the "cold war".

Malta has been fought over, colonized and maneuvered by the empires of Rome, the Ottomans, the British, the Russian and the Americans yet retains a unique language, culture and position of influence in the world.

You may not realize that many movies were filmed on one of the islands of Malta, even if the actual location was supposed to be elsewhere.  A few examples:  "Gladiator", "Troy", "Captain Phillips", "Munich", "The Spy Who Loved Me", "13 Hours", "Assassin's Creed", "Midnight Express", "The Count of Monte Cristo", "World War Z", "The Da Vinci Code".

Aside from historically significant international meetings hosted there, Malta remains as low key and insular as possible, unless there is an overt assassination too public to ignore.

One recent, high profile case is the car bomb killing on Malta, of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. Ms. Galizia exposed the Panama papers. A scandal of anti corruption reports and documents tracing money laundering, child trafficking, organized crime by heads of state. She also dug into the crash of a plane carrying five French customs officials investigating trafficking.  And the cover up by officials of Malta.

But aside from these sudden, violent events bringing Malta into the global media spotlight, Malta prides itself as a “civil, polite, generous and tolerant society.”

The most famous symbol and personages here are the Knights of Malta Hospitaller officially known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta  (SMOM) aka The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta  (Latin: Supremus Ordo Militaris Hospitalis Sancti Ioannis Hierosolymitani Rhodius et Melitensis).  They are known to be a "Catholic, religious, lay order  (a bit of an oxymoron already) who serve people in need."

Originally, the Knights Hospitaller formed out of a hospital established in Jerusalem to treat Christian pilgrims via papal edict in the seventh century. Some four hundred years later, in the early eleventh century, the hospital was destroyed by Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah.  During the 1020s, efforts to rebuild it fell under the jurisdiction of the Benedictine monastic order.  In 1126 they adopted the Maltese Cross.

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