A village festa in Rabat: pyrotechnics and pasta

We stumbled into the festa by accident

We’d parked the car near Mdina at around 7pm, planning to catch the sunset from the bastions. Coming down towards Rabat — the village that abuts the walled city — we heard it before we saw it: a brass band playing something between a military march and a hymn, at a volume that felt structural.

The main street of Rabat was covered in coloured fairy lights strung between buildings. A crowd — mostly Maltese, we were clearly the only tourists within several hundred metres — was moving slowly along the street in both directions, nobody going anywhere in particular. Stalls sold nougat, ftira (the Maltese flat bread, stuffed), pastizzi, and bottles of Kinnie. Someone was selling illuminated plastic wands to the children.

We had nowhere we needed to be. We stayed for four hours. It remains one of the best evenings of that trip.

What a Maltese village festa actually is

The festa — the feast day of the patron saint of a village — is the defining cultural event of the Maltese summer. Every village has one. Some have two (when two parishes share a village, they celebrate separately, and the rivalry between parishes can be intense). Between late June and mid-September, there is a festa happening somewhere in Malta almost every weekend.

The structure, broadly, is this:

The days before: decorations go up, banners stretched across the streets, the church is cleaned and the saint’s statue polished. Local fireworks makers spend months preparing what will be set off on the day. The factory-made Chinese firework does not feature in the Maltese festa — the fireworks here are made by hand in village workshops, and the tradition of Maltese pyrotechnics (petarda, murtali) is one of the island’s genuinely distinctive craft traditions.

The night before: a band march through the village. These are proper brass bands — the filarmonica — and the rivalry between the two main bands of many villages (one tied to each parish) is ancient, musical and occasionally ferocious.

The feast day itself: mass, then the procession. The statue of the patron saint is carried on the shoulders of men through the streets of the village, the band playing in front, the faithful following behind. This can last two to three hours. Then the fireworks.

The fireworks: this is the part that makes every other fireworks display look like a polite suggestion. The petarda are ground-level fireworks launched from racks that produce a sequence of percussive explosions — not decorative, just loud, very loud, designed to be felt as much as heard. The aerial fireworks are coloured and elaborate. The whole sequence might last 45 minutes to an hour. The crowd watches from rooftops, balconies, and the street, entirely unfazed.

Rabat in August: what we found

The festa we stumbled into was the festa of St Paul, patron of Rabat, in mid-August. (Rabat has the church of St Paul’s Shipwreck as one of its central sites — the apostle is said to have been shipwrecked on Malta in 60 AD, and the Rabatino take their patron seriously.)

The street running from the main square down to the edge of the village was closed to traffic. Stalls had replaced the parked cars. Families occupied every available step and ledge. Someone had a grill going at the far end, selling rabbit — fenek, the Maltese national dish — for €8 a plate.

We ate fenek standing up, which is the correct way to eat it at a festa. The meat is braised in a sauce of garlic, white wine and herbs. It falls off the bone. The vendor’s grandmother was adjusting the temperature of the pot with the authority of someone who has been doing this for 60 years.

The band march came through around 9pm. Two dozen musicians in brass-buttoned uniforms, the crowd parting to let them pass and closing behind them. The drum section had a particular authority. We followed them for two blocks before the crowd thickened and we let them go.

The procession

At around 10pm the doors of the church opened and the procession began. The statue of St Paul — silver, elaborate, borne on a platform maybe two metres wide — came out into the street. The men carrying it moved in a particular way: stepping, pausing, swaying the statue gently side to side, a motion that looks almost difficult to sustain and probably is. The crowd pressed in on both sides, some of them crying. Old women in black touched the base of the platform as it passed.

This is not a performance for tourists. It is a genuine religious and community event, which is exactly why it is worth attending. You are welcome to watch — nobody turned us away, nobody seemed bothered by our cameras — but the courteous approach is to stay at the edges, to step back when the platform is coming through, and not to be That Person walking alongside the procession filming into people’s faces.

The fireworks at midnight

We thought we knew what fireworks were. We were wrong.

The petarda started at 11:45pm. The ground-level racks were arranged along the field at the edge of the village — we could see them from the street. The first explosion went off and half of me expected car alarms. None came because everyone within a kilometre was either watching or had long since left their car somewhere else. The second explosion. The third. A sequence building to something that physically moved the air.

The aerial display began after midnight. The colours were vivid — reds and golds and greens — and the shells burst enormous. The crowd cheered at particular sequences. There is apparently a connoisseurship to fireworks appreciation in Malta that takes years to develop; what looked like chaos to me had a structure that the Maltese crowd clearly understood.

We left around 12:30am, ears ringing pleasantly, smelling of fireworks and rabbit sauce, very tired and very happy.

How to find a festa

The calendario festi changes every year. The Malta Tourism Authority publishes the season’s dates — usually by May — and it’s worth checking before you travel. The festas calendar guide on this site keeps an updated list. The pattern is roughly: small village festas from June, reaching a peak in late July and August, finishing in September.

The larger village festas (Rabat, Naxxar, Mosta, Birgu, Victoria in Gozo) are worth a special trip. But the smaller ones — a village you’ve never heard of, a saint you can’t name, 200 people and a brass band and a grandmother with a rabbit stew — are sometimes more memorable.

Go hungry. Stay late. Wear earplugs for the fireworks if you’re noise-sensitive. Do not try to find parking within 500 metres.

This is Malta at its most itself, and it is entirely without performance.