The Inquisitor's Palace

The building began as a courthouse in the 1530s and became the seat of the tribunal in 1574. It remained so until Napoleon abolished the Inquisition in Malta in 1798.

Sixty-two inquisitors held office in these rooms. Several went on to become cardinals, and two became Pope.

Less lurid than the word suggests, and considerably more interesting. Malta was a small island carrying an enormous transient population: knights from every corner of Catholic Europe, slaves, corsairs, merchants and sailors, alongside a substantial Muslim and formerly Muslim community.

Most of the tribunal's work concerned blasphemy, bigamy, superstition, love magic and unwise remarks made in taverns. It was an instrument for policing behaviour in a crowded port, and because it wrote down what ordinary people were saying, its records now tell us more about daily life here than any other source.

The layout does the explaining. The courtroom is deliberately low, so the accused stood while the tribunal sat. The cells still carry graffiti scratched by prisoners.

Above them is the piano nobile: the inquisitor's own apartments, comfortable, well lit and decorated, because the man running the tribunal was also a senior papal diplomat with people to entertain.

The palace now holds the national ethnography collection as well, so you pass from a seventeenth-century courtroom into displays of Maltese religious life. The pairing is less odd than it sounds — both are about how belief was actually lived here.