Rotunda of Mosta

Interesting facts

In 1983 a taxi driver, on a bet, drove a Mercedes up the steps and through the main doors, stopping near the altar; he got three months in prison.

Mosta's residents helped build the church themselves, labouring on the site on Sundays and public holidays.

Because worship never stopped on the site during construction, the finished church did not need to be consecrated.

Giorgio Grognet de Vassé had no formal architectural training, so he relied on advice from an architect of the Sammut family.

Bishop Francesco Saverio Caruana opposed Grognet's Pantheon-inspired design, but it was approved anyway and work began in 1833.

Mosta appears as a parish in a pastoral visit of 1575, but it formally became one only in 1608, shortly before its first church was built.

The older church it replaced, completed around 1614, was popularly known as Ta' Ziri.

An 1839 book, written while the rotunda was rising, predicted it would immortalise its architect and draw every visitor to Malta to the village.

Inside, the round plan is divided into eight niches, one holding the main entrance and another a deep apse with the high altar.

Why it is worth it

A plain-looking town in the middle of Malta carries one of the largest church domes ever raised: the Rotunda of Mosta, officially the Sanctuary Basilica of the Assumption of Our Lady, rests its cupola on walls roughly nine metres thick, and the dome spans about 130 feet inside. For a time it was counted among the three biggest domes in the world, and its round, columned silhouette dominates the low skyline of the island's interior.

The design came from Giorgio Grognet de Vassé, a self-taught architect who took the Pantheon in Rome as his model and produced a Neoclassical rotunda fronted by a portico of six Ionic columns between two bell towers. Choosing a pagan temple as the pattern for a Catholic parish church was controversial at the time. Building began on 30 May 1833 around the older Renaissance church of about 1614, attributed to Tommaso Dingli, so that worship never had to stop; only when the new shell was standing, in 1860, was the old church taken down from within. The work took some 28 years, and the church was dedicated on 15 October 1871. In 2018 it was raised to the rank of minor basilica.

The Rotunda is also remembered for an episode of the Second World War. On 9 April 1942, during an air raid on Malta, a German bomb pierced the dome and fell into the church while a congregation was gathered inside, yet did not explode. A Royal Engineers bomb disposal unit defused it and dropped it into the sea off Malta's west coast. Locals took the escape as a miracle, and the casing of an identical bomb is shown in the sacristy. Mosta itself is a sizeable residential town at the centre of the island, and the church square is its focal point.

Getting there

The Rotunda stands in the centre of Mosta, about 0.1 km from the town's core. The nearest airport is Malta International Airport (MLA), about 9 km away. Mosta is linked by road to Valletta and the rest of the island.

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From the encyclopaedia

The Sanctuary Basilica of the Assumption of Our Lady, commonly known as the Rotunda of Mosta or the Mosta Dome, is a Roman Catholic parish church and basilica in Mosta, Malta, dedicated to the Assumption of Mary. It was built between 1833 and the 1860s to neoclassical designs of Giorgio Grognet de Vassé, on the site of an earlier Renaissance church which had been built around 1614 to designs of Tommaso Dingli.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia