Explore Mdina

The National Museum of Natural History is housed in Palazzo Vilhena, a French Baroque palace built in 1726–1728 for Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena to designs by Charles François de Mondion. Opened in 1973, it displays rocks, minerals and fossils, shells, insects, and the birds, mammals and marine life of the Maltese islands.

The Mdina Cathedral Museum occupies the former diocesan seminary, a Baroque building of 1733–1742 by Andrea Belli facing the cathedral. Its collections include woodcuts and engravings by Albrecht Dürer, coins from antiquity to the Knights, church silver, vestments, manuscripts and paintings by Maltese and Italian artists.

Palazzo Falson is a medieval palace in Mdina, built in the 13th century and enlarged in the 15th, with Gothic doorways and windows around a small courtyard. From 1927 to 1962 it was the home of the collector Olof Gollcher, and his collection of paintings, silver, arms and armour, furniture, carpets and books is shown in the rooms as a house museum.

The Domvs Romana preserves the remains of a wealthy Roman town house of the 1st century BC, found in 1881 just outside the walls of Mdina. Its polychrome mosaic floors, among them a scene of doves drinking from a bowl, are shown in situ, with marble statues of the imperial family and everyday objects, in a neoclassical museum building of 1882.

The Wignacourt Museum occupies the Baroque residence of the chaplains of the Knights of St John in Rabat, founded under Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt in the early 17th century. It is linked to St Paul's Grotto, where tradition says the apostle lived on Malta, and shows paintings by Mattia Preti and Antoine Favray, catacombs and Second World War shelters.

The Lascaris War Rooms are tunnels and chambers cut into the rock beneath the Upper Barrakka Gardens, opened in 1940 as the combined war headquarters for the defence of Malta. The Allied landings in Sicily in July 1943 were directed from here, and NATO used the complex until 1977. Restored operations rooms show the plotting tables and wall maps.

MUŻA is Malta's national community art museum, opened in 2018 in the Auberge d'Italie, the 16th-century inn of the Italian knights, whose Baroque facade carries a bronze bust of Grand Master Gregorio Carafa. It succeeded the National Museum of Fine Arts and shows Maltese and European art from the Middle Ages onwards, including works by Mattia Preti.

The National Museum of Archaeology occupies the Auberge de Provence, built in 1571 to designs by Girolamo Cassar on Republic Street. It shows finds from Malta's prehistoric temples and tombs, among them the Sleeping Lady from the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum and the Venus of Malta from Ħaġar Qim, as well as Bronze Age and Phoenician objects.

The Malta at War Museum occupies an 18th-century army barracks at the Couvre Porte gate of Birgu and tells the story of the islands in the Second World War, when they were among the most heavily bombed places in Europe. It shows the wartime newsreel Malta G.C., uniforms and objects of civilian life, and leads into a rock-cut air-raid shelter beneath the town.

The Inquisitor's Palace in Birgu was built in the 1530s as the law courts of the Order of St John and from 1574 to 1798 was the seat of the Roman Inquisition in Malta. Visitors see the inquisitors' apartments, the tribunal room, the chapel and the prison cells, whose walls still carry prisoners' graffiti; it also houses a museum of ethnography.

Esplora is an interactive science centre opened in 2016 in the grounds of Villa Bighi, a villa of 1675 above the Grand Harbour that became the Royal Naval Hospital Bighi in the 1830s. Its historic buildings and gardens hold hands-on exhibits on physics, the human body and the environment, and a planetarium with a 10.7-metre dome.