The Domus Romana

They date to around the first century BC, are set in very fine tesserae, and are good enough that they are usually credited to craftsmen brought in from Sicily or further afield — nothing else of that period found on the island reaches the same standard.

The centrepiece shows two doves drinking from a bowl, a motif copied across the Roman world from a famous Greek original. A geometric floor nearby carries a three-dimensional illusion that still works perfectly two thousand years on.

The walls of Mdina say fortress. This house says something else: Roman Melite was not a garrison outpost but a provincial town with residents wealthy enough to commission work of this quality, living around colonnaded courtyards on a street of comparable houses.

Long after the house fell into ruin, the ground was used as a cemetery in the eleventh century, and Muslim tombstones were found cut down into the Roman levels. Several are displayed on site.

One small plot therefore compresses the island's whole story: Roman, then Arab, then abandonment, then a Victorian accident with a spade.