Inquisitor Galeazzo Marescotti’s instruttione

Abstract

For a schoolboy in Malta in the late 1980s/early 1990s, it was practically de rigueur; you would read about ‘the Norman House’ of Mdina in the monochrome pages of Ġrajjet Malta and then walk past this sombre looking building on a school trip as teachers attempted to make school children respect the venerable myth of Mdina as ‘the Silent City’. On such occasions one almost invariably—at least in my case—set off on many imaginative journeys to try picture what treasures lay hidden behind that big, pointed, imposing door. Fast forward to 2007 and those doors were thrown wide open to an eager local and international public; 2017 marked ten years of successful operations at the Palazzo Falson Historic House Museum as a new, ‘old’ landmark on Malta’s cultural landscape. While some still refer to it as the Norman House, it seems to be more widely known now as Palazzo Falson—an intriguing example of how public memory can be moulded and changed by a positive example of good practice in museum management.