St Paul's Cathedral

Around AD 60 a ship carrying prisoners to Rome was wrecked on Malta in a winter storm. The Acts of the Apostles records that the islanders showed the survivors unusual kindness and that the chief man of the island, named as Publius, took them in for three days.

Tradition puts Publius's house on this ground and makes him Malta's first bishop. Whatever you make of the history, the religious identity of the whole island rests on that storm, and this square is its address.

The earthquake of 11 January 1693 left the medieval cathedral all but destroyed. The commission went to the Maltese architect Lorenzo Gafà, who had spent thirty years getting steadily better at exactly this, and he delivered the present building within a decade.

Judge it from the square by the dome: confident, beautifully proportioned, and visible from half of Malta.

Two things came through the earthquake. One is the great carved door of the Norman cathedral, which now opens into the sacristy. The other is the apse fresco of the Shipwreck of Saint Paul by Mattia Preti — the Calabrian who painted the vault of St John's in Valletta — finished roughly a decade before the quake and unharmed by it, a fact the cathedral has never stopped mentioning.

Inside, the floor repays as much attention as the ceiling: inlaid marble tomb slabs for bishops and canons rather than knights, with the same skulls and the same competitive Latin as St John's.

On the way out, look back at the two clocks on the facade. One gives the time, the other the date and month. The story is that the false one is there to confuse the Devil about when to interrupt the service — a story nobody quite believes and everybody repeats.