Geology of Malta The largest of the second set are the Victoria Lines Fault on northern Malta and the Qala Fault on southern Gozo. Overall, the islands of the archipelago are tilted towards the northeast, with cliffs on the southwest coast and descending gradients towards the northeast. The Maltese archipalego is linked to Sicily by an underwater plateau of depths of less than 100 m. During different marine regressions of the Mediterranean, Malta has been connected to Sicily by a surface isthmus by which animals have been able to cross, as evinced by the presence of island dwarfism (Maltese dwarf hippopotamus and dwarf
Name of Italy "Italia" to a larger region, but it was during the reign of Augustus, at the end of the 1st century BC, that the term was expanded to cover the entire peninsula until the Alps, now entirely under Roman rule. Under Emperor Diocletian the Roman region called "Italia" was further enlarged with the addition of the three big islands of the western Mediterranean Sea: Sicily (with the Maltese archipelago), Sardinia and Corsica. Dante in the 14th century wrote that the borders of what is geographically and historically called "Italia" are clearly defined in the north by the Alps (from the Vare