St Paul's Grotto

The archaeology is narrower than the tradition. The chamber was quarried out of the rock at the margin of the Roman town, on ground given over to burials, and devotion to it as Paul's dwelling is documented from the medieval centuries onward. Popes have come to it; Grand Masters paid for it.

In the seventeenth century Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt built the college above it and granted the complex to a body of chaplains, which is why the museum you enter through carries his name.

Whatever you make of the cave itself, its consequence is not in dispute. The island traces the arrival of its Christianity to that storm, and has held to the claim without a break for longer than almost any country in Europe.

The tenth of February is a public holiday. The story that begins at the cathedral in Mdina ends in this cave.

During the Second World War the passages and old quarries beneath the college were extended by hand into air raid shelters, and hundreds of people from Rabat lived down there through the worst of the bombing.

You can walk them. They are low and narrow, the pick marks still sharp in the rock, with small family chambers off the main tunnels — some numbered, some carrying the name of the family who dug them. Two thousand years apart, the same instinct and the same rock: when the sky is dangerous, Malta goes underground.