Hello, /r/AskHistorians ,
On two previous occasions in the past three years I have received fantastic advice from this community, so I'm hoping to go to the well once more. My wife and I aren't experts in any particular field but are passionate amateurs for history. Our favorite moments of past trips have been history in situ rather than in museums: Newgrange, Paestum, and Chedowrth Villa (in Cirencester) for example. With that being said, we are planning a return trip to Italy next September (my wife, she's quite the planner :)). We are currently planning to re-visit Rome (Hadrian's Villa and Ostia Antica highlight this leg), then on to Sicily for the first time and then back up to Venice.
The Venice portion of the trip is getting a little murky, however, partially due to some travel itinerary snags, and that has left us looking at the map for possible alternatives. Given a 4-5 day gap in our schedule and a willingness to roam (a-ha-ha) (ugh), are there any hidden treasures nearby that beckon? We started peeking at Malta and Tunisia, but really anything goes. The ideal would be for the travel to not consume an entire day (we're going for 20, but that doesn't go nearly as far as one might think).
As always, thank you all in advance for your replies!
PS If you have similar advice for Sicily that would be keen as well, but I don't want to go too broad in a single post.
Malta has many archaeological sites relating to my field, the Knights Hospitaller. The Hospitallers were a militarised monastic order that fought in the crusades. After the loss of the Holy Land in 1291 they eventually moved to Rhodes in the fourteenth century, and were then given control of Malta in the sixteenth. The capital, Valletta, was built by the Hospitallers and named after one of their grandmasters, Jean de Vallette.
The Hospitallers held Malta for over three hundred years, and so left alot of marks on the island. In Valletta alone there is the Hospitallers' Fort St Elmo, Fort St Angelo, and St John's Co-Cathedral (which has amazing memorials to Hospitaller knights across the walls and floors of the nave). If you're looking for something earlier chronological, Malta is also famous for it's prehistory. The neighbouring island of Gozo has the bronze age temple complex of Ggantija.
Also, as you mentioned Rome, one of my favourite churches there is the Basilica of San Clemente al Laterano. It's between the Colosseum and the Lateran Basilican. On the inside it looks like a normal medieval church with some early modern renovations, but if you go downstairs there are the remains of a 4th century church, which was originally a Mithraic temple. The early Christian wall paintings still survive.