This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Christopher Mannino, 45, an author who moved from Middletown, Delaware, to Swieqi, Malta, a Mediterranean island just 122 square miles in size, with his wife and two young children in June 2025. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
During the pandemic, I was freelancing at the time, and I was writing an article about “worldschooling.” I had never heard of it, and I started interviewing these people around the world, and these are families who were just traveling the world with their kids.
My wife and I had both lived abroad, and we loved the idea, and we said if we ever make it out of the pandemic, we want to do something like this with our kids.
We had been planning to do something global for a long time, and took a test run in 2024. We spent a month in Ireland testing out a number of things and how the kids did.
Courtesy of Christopher Mannino
We also learned about different kinds of worldschooling.
There are a lot of people who will basically homeschool on the road and just move place to place. There are some people who are in a different country every month — some people who move every other week.
And then there’s the opposite, which is more like us. We need our kids to be in schools — they need some structure. We want to travel the world, but very, very slowly.
We had made that decision in about September of 2024 that we were going to find a country. The very first question was, where can we legally work?
If you’re an American citizen, you can go to Europe for 90 days. That’s fine, but A, you’re not really bringing an income, and B, then you have to leave after three months.
There are some countries around the world, like Malta, where you can be a digital nomad. We were already working fully remotely, so we had to start researching where we could get a visa.
Courtesy of Christopher Mannino
We decided that because our kids are very young and have some anxiety issues, we wanted to go to a country where English was an official language. That list suddenly gets smaller. We have a bunch of family in Europe, so we decided to focus on Europe; the list gets even smaller. And then we wanted somewhere with nice weather.
At that point you’re down to pretty much just Malta.
I will fully admit that we did not know anything about Malta. My first trip to Malta was in April of 2025, with just me and my son to secure our housing rental. That was the first time I had set foot on Malta. My wife and daughter stayed back in America, and I remember feeling very nervous before the move. Are they even going to like it?
We decided, worst-case scenario, we were going to be there for a year and try it out. And what ended up happening was the polar opposite.
We love it. We’re actually switching visas at the moment. So we’ll be here for at least three more years after that.
Malta’s culture is unlike anywhere else in the world
Malta has a very different culture than anywhere we’ve been. It’s very different than the pictures make it look. Pictures make it look kind of Italian, but it’s not Italy at all. There are a lot of other influences from the English, from the Arabs, and from North Africa.
I think Malta has an interesting blend of backgrounds; historically, it’s ancient — the second-oldest freestanding structure on Earth is here in Malta — but nationally, it’s very young. Malta’s only been an independent country for 50 years.
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It’s a very friendly place. It’s very family-oriented and aware of your needs, and we really value that. Everywhere you go, it’s like, “Do you need extra help for your kids, or do you need this, or that?”
The support, the amount of kids’ activities, the amount of kid-friendly things everywhere, it genuinely feels different.
It’s also a slower pace. My parents came to visit last weekend from Ireland, and we were talking about how we’re doing and our jobs, and they looked at my wife and me, and said, “You guys have not adjusted to the Maltese-style work-life balance yet.”
We work a lot, and we’re trying to get into that mentality where it’s OK to do less.
The country’s small size makes it easier to do more with my family
Another cultural thing that’s different here is about distance.
For the last seven months, I haven’t had a car, which is really weird. To get anywhere, I walk or I take the bus. You can get around without a car anywhere easily.
We used to drive 20 minutes to go to the grocery store in the US. If I describe a 20-minute drive here, the mentality is like, “Oh man, why are you going to go on such a long drive?”
We tried to do a lot in the United States. I think part of it was just the distance. When we lived in Delaware, one of our favorite places to go was the zoo. The closest really good zoo was the Philadelphia Zoo. That’s a little over an hour away, which at the time felt close.
In retrospect, the amount of time we were spending just getting to places was a lot. It made us want to do things a little less.
Here, we have really tried to make an effort to do a lot of family stuff.
When my parents came, we went to a giant children’s museum. We were at the aquarium. We were at the top of the tallest building in Malta.
When my son had his birthday, we chartered a boat and went out on a dolphin watch right on the Mediterranean, then into these sea caves. We were just thinking to ourselves, this is so different.
Courtesy of Christopher Mannino
It’s so unique to be able to do this. My wife had a birthday shortly after that, and I chartered a boat for just the two of us. I wanted to do something special for her birthday, and we did a sunset boat ride that took us to a private place to go swimming. We had a meal at sunset in a bay.
We were saying to each other, “This is not the stuff we used to be able to do.”
Moving does take some courage and it is a little scary at times, getting rid of everything and wondering what the heck we’re doing. It can be really worth it, though.
My son and I were on our way back from a trip down to a cave from the ice age, and we were looking at the bones and stuff.
On the cab ride back, he told me how grateful he was to be able to go to different countries and see so many different things. I felt so validated. I was like, “Yes, you are understanding what we’re trying to do.”
