Fodor's Expert Review Malta at War

There's no shortage of museums unraveling Malta's military history, but few are as intimate. Housed inside an 18th-century army barracks and labyrinthine, rock-cut, underground air-raid shelter, it focuses on the period from 1940 to 1943, when World War II and the Blitz came to Malta—then a strategically vital outpost for the Allied Forces and stepping stone to Fascist Italy. Through artifacts, newsreels, and a stirring propaganda documentary, narrated by Laurence Olivier and released by King George VI in January 1943 to pluck up the spirits of his battered Maltese subjects, it shows daily life as the bombs fell and hope was all but lost and then found again.