Malta

Malta is a unitary parliamentary republic made up of an archipelago in the central Mediterranean about 80 kilometers south of Italy, with Valletta as its capital, the smallest capital city in the European Union by both area and population. At 316 square kilometers with roughly 588,254 residents, it is the world's tenth smallest country by area and the ninth most densely populated, and is often described as a city-state because of its urban concentration. The islands were colonized by Phoenician traders after 1000 BC and passed through Carthaginian and Roman rule before Arabs arrived around 870 AD, introducing agricultural innovations and the Siculo-Arabic language from which modern Maltese descends; Norman conquest in 1091 restored Christian rule, and the Knights Hospitaller governed from 1530 to 1798, repelling an Ottoman siege in 1565 before Napoleon briefly captured the islands in 1798 and Britain took control soon after. Malta gained statehood on 21 September 1964 and became a parliamentary republic on 13 December 1974, joining the European Union in 2004 and adopting the euro in 2008.