Gozo
— — the older sister, slower, still.
Not only on a wall.
“Gozo lies five kilometres across the channel from Malta's main island, smaller and a little older in feeling. The Cittadella looks down over Victoria from a limestone hill, and the Ġgantija temples on the ridge above Xagħra were built before the pyramids of Giza. Fishing villages cup the south coast at Marsalforn and Xlendi. The ferry runs every forty-five minutes from Ċirkewwa, and back.
Gozo, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Gozo is the second-largest of the Maltese islands, sixty-seven square kilometres of limestone tablelands rising above a hard-walled coast in the central Mediterranean, fifty kilometres south of Sicily. About thirty-seven thousand people live across the island's fourteen villages, the largest being the capital, Victoria, known locally as Rabat. The ferry from Ċirkewwa on Malta crosses the five-kilometre channel in twenty-five minutes and runs every forty-five minutes through the day. The local language is Maltese, the only Semitic language written in Latin script.
The Ġgantija temples, on the ridge above Xagħra, were built between 3600 and 3200 BCE, older than Stonehenge and older than the pyramids at Giza, and are recognised by UNESCO as among the world's earliest free-standing stone structures. The Cittadella above Victoria, the fortified medieval citadel that dominates Gozo's interior skyline, has been a refuge since at least the Bronze Age and was rebuilt under the Knights of St John after the corsair raid of 1551 that emptied the island.
Gozo's coastline is shorter than Malta's but more dramatic, cut by inlets and small bays whose names locals still use as harbours. Dwejra on the west coast held the Azure Window, the natural limestone arch that collapsed in a storm in March 2017; the underwater Blue Hole next to it remains one of the most-dived sites in the Mediterranean. Red sand colours Ramla Bay on the north coast, the largest sand beach on the island. The fishing villages of Marsalforn and Xlendi anchor the smaller coves.