The Grandmaster's Palace

Girolamo Cassar began the palace around 1571 and almost every ruler who occupied it afterwards extended it. The facade is long, plain and close to dull; the corner balconies are the only flourish, and they were added much later.

Set it beside the Auberge de Castille, which is a langue showing off, and the point becomes clear. This is the head of state, in a fortress city, choosing not to.

The list runs to twenty-one Grand Masters, covering the 1570s to the French seizure of the island in 1798; then a short and unloved French administration; then a century and a half of British governors; then the Maltese parliament, sitting latterly in the old armoury hall until it moved to Renzo Piano's building by the gate in 2015.

It is now the office of the President of Malta, and much of it is open to visitors.

The two courtyards come first: one with a bronze Neptune at its centre, the other with the eighteenth-century Pinto clock, where bronze figures strike the hours.

Then the corridors, whose upper walls carry a painted account of the 1565 siege. Matteo Perez d'Aleccio made it within a generation of the fighting, drawing on what survivors told him, which makes the cycle about as close to war reporting as that siege ever got.

The Council Chamber is hung with enormous Gobelins tapestries of Brazil, Africa and India: jungle, elephants, a rhinoceros, people and animals no knight in that room had ever seen. They were commissioned in 1710 by a Grand Master following the tradition of making a gift to the Order on election. The palace also holds the Armoury, several thousand pieces of the Order's arms and armour including parade armour made for Grand Masters — one of the largest such collections still in the building where it was assembled.