Our retreat home sits in the Maltese countryside, among terraced fields and golden farmhouses threaded with rubble walls older than memory. Malta is tiny and remarkably full — three UNESCO World Heritage Sites on an island you can drive the length in under an hour so there’s no wonder that’s not within reach.

Our countryside base is being chosen the way everything on this voyage is: for golden limestone, a long table, a garden worth waking in, and room to be alone. Announced with the dates.

Malta holds seven thousand years in an area smaller than most cities: Neolithic temples, Roman villas, Arabic names still on the map, walled medieval towns. We'll descend into the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum — an underground sanctuary carved from living rock over five thousand years ago, where only eighty visitors are admitted each day, and stand at ruins most of the world has never heard of.

Melita earned her name from Wild thyme honey, rock-cut Roman apiaries beside an ancient road, and rituals built from what the island has always made: honey, olive oil, sea salt. We will learn about harvesting practices of each and practice rituals near the sea & the sun. A visit to a local Maltese spa will be incorporated into the itinerary.

This is the deep dive: farm visits and honey tastings, the beehives on the Roman road, village feasts, and the legends kept close, Calypso's cave above a red-sand bay, the goddess the temples were raised for. Phoenician, Roman, Arab, Norman, every civilization left fingerprints here, and we'll follow them with our own.