The centre piece of La Valletta is St John’s co-cathedral, the conventual church, dating from 1577, of the order of the Knights of Saint John. It’s called a co-cathedral since Malta has another cathedral in its former capital of Mdina.

The exterior, flanked by two bell towers, is rather sober:

It certainly doesn’t prepare for the enveloping sumptuousness on stepping inside. One gets the feeling of  entering a huge golden treasure casket:

The barrel vault is magnificently decorated in baroque style with much work completed in 1666 by the Calabrian painter Mattia Preti. One of Italy’s major seventeenth century artists Preti is also responsible for works in many other Maltese churches and is buried in the cathedral to which he devoted so much of his art.

Yet one does not visit St John’s to principally see Preti’s paintings but instead to admire a masterpiece from the hand of one of the most controversial baroque artists, Michelangelo Merisi known as ‘Il Caravaggio’. Fleeing to Malta from a murder he was involved with in Naples (his violent temper often got him into scrapes and he later had to flee from Malta itself) Caravaggio painted the altar-piece in the oratory depicting the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. It’s the largest painting he produced and the only one he signed. The tough realism and his virtuoso ‘chiaroscuro’ (’light ‘dark’) technique are absolutely stunning.

The cathedral’s side chapels are dedicated to the eight langues or divisions of the order of Saint John and contain funerary monuments of the Grand Masters.  The splendid inlaid marble floor is made up of tombstones, decorated with heraldic devices of the knights.

We also visited the cathedral museum which holds a collection of rich ecclesiastical vestments and a magnificent collection of Flemish tapestries.

The richness of the furnishing of La Valletta’s St John’s cathedral gave us an indication of how much wealth the Knights of Saint John must have possessed in their heyday. It was a wealth to which every major European power contributed for La Valletta stood (and still symbolically stands, as the Pope’s visits demonstrate) as a bastion of Christianity against the onslaught of Mohammedanism.

Today a different kind of onslaught is occurring. Rather than military it is a desperate one: the arrival of refuges across the sea from Africa landing on the shores of this tiny nation. Indeed, relations between Italy and Malta have often been somewhat strained because of this situation and it continues to remain a very difficult matter.