St. John's Co-Cathedral

From the street, St John's in Valletta gives almost nothing away. Girolamo Cassar, the Maltese military engineer who laid out much of the new fortified capital after the Great Siege of 1565, gave the Knights of St John a sober, almost fortress-like front of local limestone. The church was built between 1573 and 1577 at the expense of Grand Master Jean de la Cassière and consecrated in 1578 as the conventual church of the Order. The restraint outside is deliberate, and it makes the moment of stepping through the door one of the great surprises of European architecture.

Inside, almost every surface is gilded, carved or painted. The transformation came in the 1660s, when the Calabrian painter Mattia Preti was commissioned to turn the plain Mannerist hall into a Baroque showpiece. He painted the vault with episodes from the life of John the Baptist, handling the figures so that their shadows seem to fall across real architecture, and he designed the stone walls that were carved in place rather than moulded from stucco. Along the nave open the chapels of the langues, the national divisions of the Order - Auvergne, Aragon, Castile, Provence, France, Italy, Germany and the rest - each competing with the next in marble and gold and holding the monuments of the grand masters who belonged to it.

Look down as much as up. The floor is a continuous carpet of some four hundred inlaid marble tombstones of knights and officers, a riot of coloured stone with skeletons, crowns, trophies and coats of arms, the more important knights lying nearer the altar. Beneath, a crypt holds grand masters including Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and Jean Parisot de Valette, the defender of 1565. In the oratory hangs Caravaggio's Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, painted in 1608 while he was in Malta: his largest canvas and the only one he ever signed. His Saint Jerome Writing hangs nearby, and the museum keeps a set of Flemish tapestries after designs by Rubens, presented by Grand Master Ramon Perellos.

After the Order was expelled by the French in 1798 the church became a parish church, and in the nineteenth century it was raised to the rank of co-cathedral. Walter Scott, visiting in 1831, called its interior the most striking he had ever seen. A foundation set up in 2001 now looks after it, and restoration campaigns have brought back the colour of the walls and the pale honey of the façade.

Getting there

The co-cathedral stands in the heart of Valletta, Malta's walled capital, built on its peninsula by the Knights after 1565. Malta International Airport (MLA) is about 6 km away.