Adventures on the isle that seduced Odysseus

Gozo — Malta’s tiny island neighbour — was once rather a crucial spot in the Mediterranean. The Knights of Malta built a wall across Gozo’s Ramla Bay to stop Napoleon invading. The clever little Corsican attacked via the undefended gully next door instead.

Homer’s island of Ogygia — ‘the navel of the sea’ in the Odyssey — is thought to be Gozo. It was in a love-cave above Ramla Bay that Odysseus caroused with the honey–voiced sea-nymph Calypso. Stranded on the beach, clinging to a plank from his shattered boat, he took refuge in her arms- — for seven years. He wasn’t that desperate to get home to his darling wife, Penelope, on Ithaca.

I tracked down the love-cave — there was no seductive nymph to greet me. But Gozo still had all the charms of a Mediterranean holiday island with none of the holiday crowds. No wonder Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie hired a beach on Gozo — -trickily named Mgarr ix-Xini — to film her new movie By the Sea. Gozo is the Hollywood ideal of the Mediterranean before the tourist boom — and before the melancholy tide of migrants that has swept into Malta over the past few years.

Only a few tourists bother to drive up to Calypso’s cave through the strange landscape: deserted fields of cacti next to -vineyards -producing the upmarket Marsovin Antonin red wine. Not many visitors make it to the Stone Age ruins, either. The temple of Ggantija — ‘the Giantess’, because it was thought to have been built by giants — is 1,000 years older than Stonehenge.

It would be mad not to visit Gozo’s big brother Malta, only a 25-minute ferry ride away. It has its own exceptional ancient site: the Hypogeum, an underground burial chamber that could date from as early as 3,300 bc.