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Photo: Plamen Agov (Пламен Агов), CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Admission to the cathedral and the museum is included in a single ticket. Cathedral was built in the Baroque style by Lorenzo Gafà after the earthquake of 1693 destroyed the original 12th-century Norman structure. Like the Cathedral of St. John in Valletta, its floor is covered with intricately inlaid marble gravestones belonging to Maltese aristocracy. Also noteworthy is the impressive wall painting at the back of the cathedral depicting the shipwrecking of St Paul on Malta. The face has two clocks (one for time and one for date). There is an apocryphal (though much repeated and widely published) story that the reasoning was to have one clock that showed the correct time and one that served to confuse the devil.
The Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Paul, commonly known as St Paul's Cathedral or the Mdina Cathedral, is a Catholic cathedral in Mdina, Malta, dedicated to St. Paul the Apostle. The cathedral was founded in the 12th century, and according to tradition it stands on the site where Roman governor Publius met St. Paul following his shipwreck on Malta. The original cathedral was severely damaged in the 1693 Sicily earthquake, so it was dismantled and rebuilt in the Baroque style to a design of the Maltese architect Lorenzo Gafà between 1696 and 1705. The cathedral is regarded as Gafà's masterpiece.
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Admission to the cathedral and the museum is included in a single ticket. The quaint cathedral museum houses a variety of different small collections. Perhaps the most important is a beautiful set of woodcut prints The Life of the Virgin by Albrecht Dürer. Furthermore, it has a collection of the cathedral's attributes and a tiny display of the 19th-century priests who took the initiative to develop Maltese in a written form. Amazingly, as it was never in the colonial power's interest, the Maltese had to do without writing in their own language since the Arabs left in the 11th century. The entire archive of the inquisition in Malta, which was only banned by Napoleon the day he invaded, is kept here but is not on public display.
The museum is housed in an 18th-century palace, designed in Parisian Baroque style. It covers various topics such as Maltese Geology and Palaeontology, exotic mammals, marine fauna, insects, shells and birds and other topics like human evolution.
Located within the Mdina battlements, this cultural attraction presents the origins and history of the Order of the Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem through a series of tableaux and a 3D audio-visual show.