Explore Mellieħa

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 Auberge de Castille was built in 1574 by Girolamo Cassar for the knights of the langue of Castile, León and Portugal, and rebuilt in 1741–1745 under Grand Master Pinto with the Baroque facade seen today. It has been the office of the Prime Minister of Malta since 1972 and is not open to visitors; the facade faces Castille Square.

St John's Co-Cathedral was built in 1573–1578 to designs by Girolamo Cassar as the conventual church of the Knights of St John. Its plain exterior contrasts with a Baroque interior decorated by Mattia Preti, a nave floor of some 400 inlaid marble tombstones of knights, and Caravaggio's Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1608) in the oratory.

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.

The Basilica of the Nativity of Our Lady is the parish church of Xagħra, facing the village square. It was built between 1815 and 1855, with its two bell towers completed in 1872–1892 and the dome added in 1892. Inside are marble-clad walls, a statue of the Virgin carried in procession on her feast on 8 September, and paintings by Gozitan and Italian artists.

The Grandmaster's Palace was begun in 1571 as the residence of the Grand Masters of the Order of St John and later housed the British governors; today it is the Office of the President of Malta. Visitors see the State Rooms, corridors lined with painted friezes and armorial ceilings, and the Palace Armoury with some 5,000 pieces of arms and armour.

The Upper Barrakka Gardens were laid out in 1661 on the St Peter and St Paul Bastion as a private garden for the Italian knights and opened to the public in 1824. Arcades frame a terrace overlooking the Grand Harbour and the Three Cities; below it, the Saluting Battery fires a cannon at noon and at 16:00.

The Collegiate Church of St Paul's Shipwreck commemorates the apostle Paul's shipwreck on Malta in AD 60. Built in the 1570s and remodelled in the 17th century, with a facade added in 1885, it holds a gilded wooden statue of St Paul carved by Melchiorre Cafà, a relic of the saint's wrist bone and part of the column on which he is said to have been beheaded.

Casa Rocca Piccola is a 16th-century palazzo on Republic Street, still the home of the noble de Piro family. Visits lead through rooms furnished with the family's antique furniture, silver, paintings and costumes, a small chapel and a courtyard garden, and down into rock-cut shelters used by the household during the bombing of the Second World War.

Fort St Elmo is a star-shaped fort built in 1552 at the tip of the Sciberras peninsula, before Valletta existed. It fell after a month of bombardment in the Great Siege of 1565 and was rebuilt and enlarged by the Knights. Today it houses the National War Museum, whose exhibits run from prehistory to the Second World War, including the George Cross awarded to Malta in 1942.

The Lower Barrakka Gardens lie on St Christopher Bastion at the eastern edge of Valletta, looking over the entrance to the Grand Harbour and its breakwater. At their centre stands a Doric temple built in 1810 as a monument to Sir Alexander Ball, the first British civil commissioner of Malta; the Siege Bell Memorial stands just below.