From Luqa airport you will make your way to the northernmost tip of Malta and take a 25-minute ferry ride to Gozo, an island shrouded in myth and legend.

The Phoenicians and Romans called it Gaulos, and much later the Castillians ‘the Island of Joy’, but for Homer it was Ogygia, where the nymph Calypso detained Odysseus for seven years mesmerised by her charms.

Settle into your accommodation, with time to unwind and acclimatise to the slower rhythm of island life.

As evening approaches, join your hosts and fellow guests for welcome drinks and the beginning of your culinary journey.

‍Over a relaxed aperitif, we'll introduce the extraordinary story of food in the Maltese Islands, an archipelago at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, where Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, the Knights of St John and the British have all left traces on the way people grow, cook and eat.

You'll also discover some of the ingredients and traditions we'll encounter over the coming week, from ancient grains, olive oil and honey to sheep's cheese, bread and indigenous grape varieties.

‍ Then settle around the table for our first meal together and the warmth of Gozitan hospitality, the perfect introduction to the week ahead.

After breakfast, roll up your sleeves for your first hands-on experience: an intimate Gozitan cookery class at Maldonado.

Working with seasonal ingredients, you'll discover the flavours and techniques behind traditional island cooking and the stories woven into dishes and street food that have been prepared in Maltese and Gozitan homes for generations.

Then comes the best part: sitting down together to enjoy what you've created.

Later, we turn from culinary heritage to the much older story of Gozo itself.

We'll explore the imposing Citadel rising above Victoria and the remarkable Ġgantija Neolithic Complex, home to some of the oldest surviving free-standing monumental structures in the world.

Together they reveal two very different chapters of Gozo's extraordinary past, from its prehistoric communities to the fortified island society that developed over the centuries.

From Field to Table

This evening, we return to the present with dinner at Peppina in Xewkija, where two brothers are reimagining their Gozitan culinary roots through a contemporary, vegetable-focused approach to food.

Their philosophy begins with the land. Seasonality, provenance and local produce guide a constantly evolving menu, drawing inspiration from their own fields and from the farmers and artisan producers around them. Vegetables take centre stage, complemented by carefully chosen local ingredients and transformed into inventive small plates designed for sharing.

Over a relaxed dinner, we'll discover another side of Gozitan food culture—one that respects the flavours and ingredients of the past without being constrained by them.

It is a fitting end to our day: from the recipes handed down through generations and the extraordinary monuments of Gozo's earliest inhabitants to a new generation of cooks finding fresh ways to express the island they call home.

This morning we delve into one of Gozo's most distinctive culinary traditions: the ftira Għawdxija, the Gozitan ftira.

Neither quite a pizza nor a pie, this rustic speciality is uniquely associated with Gozo. Its bread-dough base is folded around its filling but left tantalisingly open at the centre, before being baked in the fierce heat of a traditional wood-fired stone oven. Perhaps its most characteristic version combines thinly sliced potato with fresh Gozitan ġbejna, traditionally made from sheep's milk, a wonderfully simple combination that speaks of Gozo's agricultural past.

To understand the ftira, however, you need to understand the village bakery.

For generations, these smoky, wood-fired ovens were part of the rhythm of Gozitan village life. Families prepared their Sunday dishes at home and carried them to the local baker, leaving trays of meat and potatoes to slowly roast in the residual heat of the communal oven while they attended Sunday Mass. Afterwards, they would collect their cooked lunch on the way home, a wonderful example of how food, faith and community once fitted naturally into the rhythm of the same day.

We'll explore this living baking culture and discover how the island's old village ovens continue to produce the breads, savoury pies and ftajjar that remain such an important part of Gozitan food culture.

Gozo even has its own great baking rivalries. In Nadur, the neighbouring family-run bakeries Maxokk and Mekren have become island institutions, each fiercely loved for its own version of the Gozitan ftira. Mekren's story stretches back to 1899 and five generations of the same family, while Maxokk has been baking in Nadur since the early 1930s. Their continuing popularity shows how something born from the everyday food of a village can become one of the defining tastes of an entire island.

Later, we'll head into Gozo's countryside for a closer encounter with its edible landscape. Depending on the season, this may take the form of a guided foraging experience discovering the medicinal and nutritional benefits of Gozo’s landscape. or another hands-on activity exploring the wild plants, seasonal produce and traditional knowledge that have sustained island communities for generations.

As afternoon gives way to evening, we turn from bread and wild foods to another ancient Mediterranean tradition: wine.

At Massar Winery, we'll discover the changing face of Gozitan winemaking and taste wines shaped by the island's limestone soils, Mediterranean sunshine and distinctive microclimate.

From flour and fire to wild herbs and vines, today is about tasting Gozo through the landscape that created it.

‍Few ingredients tell the story of the Mediterranean as eloquently as the olive.

‍Today we spend time among the trees, discovering Malta and Gozo's centuries-old relationship with olive cultivation and tasting locally produced extra virgin olive oils.

Learn how varieties, climate, harvesting and pressing influence flavour and quality, and discover the characteristics that distinguish a carefully produced extra virgin olive oil.

‍Then, surrounded by the grove, we'll gather for a special culinary experience.

‍Here food returns to its most elemental setting: the landscape from which it comes. Seasonal produce and traditional flavours come together in a relaxed celebration of the Gozitan countryside and the people who continue to cultivate it.

‍Later, we'll cross to Malta and continue to our next accommodation.

The evening is left deliberately unhurried. Settle in, relax, use the fully equipped spa or take the opportunity to wander through Mdina as dusk falls.

When the daytime crowds disappear and lamps illuminate its narrow honey-coloured streets, Malta's ancient walled capital truly earns its name: the Silent City.

After breakfast, we travel into the countryside to discover another cornerstone of the Maltese table: cheese.

Working alongside an artisan producer, you'll learn how fresh local milk is transformed into cheese through techniques rooted in generations of rural knowledge.

This hands-on experience takes us beyond simply tasting the finished product. You'll discover the importance of the animals, the milk, fermentation, seasonality and the small decisions a cheesemaker makes at every stage of production.

Naturally, there will also be time to taste.

Later, the mood changes as we explore a very different side of Malta's past.

As darkness falls, we'll enter the winding lanes of medieval Birgu for a rather different encounter with Malta's past.

Led by Mario Cacciottolo, an award-winning guide and former BBC journalist, we'll leave the grand narratives of knights and sieges behind to uncover the wonderfully strange—and sometimes decidedly unsavoury—stories of the people who once inhabited these ancient streets.

Birgu was home to Malta's Inquisitor's Palace, where accusations of sorcery, superstition and witchcraft came before the tribunal. Drawing upon stories preserved in the historical record, we'll hear of curses, incantations and extraordinary love spells intended to secure an unwilling sweetheart or exact revenge upon an unfaithful lover, sometimes involving ingredients you certainly wouldn't expect to find in a recipe book.

As we weave through Birgu's atmospheric lanes, palazzos and fortifications, Mario will introduce us to tales of witchcraft and torture, ghosts and gruesome murders, including an executioner's house, a murderous priest and even a church said to have received a visit from the Devil himself.

It's history from the shadows: strange, entertaining and occasionally macabre, revealing the beliefs, fears, desires and superstitions of ordinary people whose stories rarely find their way into conventional histories of Malta.

‍This morning we head to Valletta, Malta's magnificent UNESCO World Heritage capital.

‍ Founded by the Knights of St John following the Great Siege of 1565, Valletta is a city built to impress. Behind its places and auberges and steeped streets, lie centuries of stories encompassing religion, warfare, trade, art and the cosmopolitan life of a Mediterranean port.

‍We'll explore the city before stepping inside St John's Co-Cathedral. Its austere limestone exterior gives little indication of the extraordinary Baroque interior within, where richly carved stone, gilding and intricate marble tombs surround one of Malta's greatest artistic treasures: Caravaggio's monumental Beheading of Saint John the Baptist.

‍ There will also be time to explore Valletta at your own pace, browse its independent shops or simply sit at a café and watch the city go by.

‍Later, we return to something much humbler, but no less important to Malta's story: bread.

‍With Professor Noel Buttigieg, Malta's leading food historian, we'll discover how bread was once quite literally a matter of survival. For centuries, Malta could not produce enough grain to feed its population, making the supply and price of wheat a constant concern for those who ruled the islands. Successive governments understood that keeping bread affordable was essential not only to preventing hunger, but also to maintaining social stability. Under British rule, attempts to liberalise the grain trade and reduce government intervention would expose just how politically charged the price of a loaf could be.

‍We'll explore Casal Qormi, today's Ħal Qormi, a town whose identity has been intertwined with bread for centuries. Renowned for its bakers and wood-fired ovens, Qormi supplied bread to nearby Valletta and developed a reputation that survives today, many Maltese will still tell you that the island's finest bread comes from Qormi.

‍But to understand Maltese bread, you need to see a bakery when it truly comes alive.

‍ After dark, we'll step behind the scenes of a traditional Qormi bakery as the night's work begins. While much of Malta sleeps, the bakers prepare their dough, tend the ovens and begin producing the crusty loaves that will appear on tables the following morning.

‍Amidst the heat, flour and aroma of freshly baked bread, Professor Buttigieg will unravel the story of one of Malta's simplest foods and reveal how the humble loaf connects agriculture, politics, hunger, community and centuries of Maltese history.

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It is a fitting contrast: from the grandeur of the Knights of St John to the everyday loaf that fed the people living beyond their palace walls.

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Our final full day begins by travelling deep into Malta's prehistoric past.

We'll descend into the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, an extraordinary subterranean complex carved into the living rock more than 5,000 years ago. One of Malta's most remarkable UNESCO World Heritage Sites, its chambers offer an intimate glimpse into the ritual world of the islands' prehistoric inhabitants.

From beneath the earth, we return to the landscape, and to one of the world’s oldest and most evocative natural sweetners: honey.

At the apiary of Professor David Mifsud, Head of the Department of Rural Sciences and Food Systems at the University of Malta, we'll discover the islands' long beekeeping tradition and the relationship between bees, native Mediterranean flora, agriculture and the distinctive character of Maltese honey.

Our final experience brings together many of the themes of the week at Ta' Betta Wine Estates.

Set among vineyards overlooking the Maltese countryside, the estate represents a contemporary expression of an ancient Mediterranean relationship between people, soil and vine.

During a guided tasting, we'll explore the estate's wines and discover how Malta's limestone geology, climate and winemaking traditions find expression in the glass.

As we raise a final glass together, we'll reflect on a week spent experiencing Malta and Gozo through their landscapes and flavours, and, above all, through the people who keep their traditions alive.

Enjoy one final breakfast before saying goodbye to Malta.