National Museum of Archaeology, Malta

Where it sits. The National Museum of Archaeology occupies the Auberge de Provence on Republic Street, a few minutes' walk inside Valletta's City Gate and almost opposite the side of the Co-Cathedral block. The building is itself part of the exhibit. Girolamo Cassar built it in 1571 as the communal residence of the langue of Provence, one of the eight national divisions of the Order of St John, and its long front of pilastered limestone with a heavily framed central doorway is among the best-preserved auberge facades in the city. Under British rule it served for over a century as the Union Club, the officers' social institution of the garrison, before being handed over for museum use in the 1950s.

What is on the ground floor. The permanent display runs chronologically through Maltese prehistory, and the ground floor covers the periods that matter most: the first farming settlement from around 5900 BC, and then the temple culture that produced the oldest free-standing monumental architecture in the world. The material comes from Ġgantija, Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra, Tarxien, Skorba and the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, and it is displayed with the site plans, which is why seeing this collection first makes the sites themselves legible. Pottery sequences from Għar Dalam through Żebbuġ, Mġarr, Ġgantija, Saflieni and Tarxien phases are laid out so the stylistic changes over three thousand years are visible in a single case.

The famous objects. Three pieces carry the collection.

• The Sleeping Lady, a small clay figure of a full-bodied woman lying on her side on a modelled couch, recovered from the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum and dated to roughly 3000 BC. It is barely twelve centimetres long, extraordinarily assured, and remains the single most reproduced image in Maltese archaeology.
• The so-called Venus of Malta, a small nude figure from Ħaġar Qim, more naturalistic than the temple culture's usual monumental style.
• The lower half of a colossal seated statue from the Tarxien temples, the original of the copy that stands on site, showing the pleated skirt and heavy calves that define the temple figures.

Alongside them are the decorated altar blocks from Ħaġar Qim with their spiral reliefs, stone temple models that tell archaeologists what the roofs may have looked like, shell and stone personal ornaments, and flint and obsidian imported from Sicily and Pantelleria, which is the hard evidence for seafaring contact across open water. A separate case holds the corpulent seated and standing figures usually labelled fertility images, whose sex is in fact indeterminate in most cases, a point the labelling now makes explicitly and which has quietly overturned a century of interpretation.

Bronze Age and later. Upstairs the sequence continues into the Bronze Age, a genuine rupture in the island's history when the temple culture ended and a different population arrived, cremating its dead and building defended settlements on high ground. The cremation cemetery inserted into the ruins of the Tarxien temples is represented here, along with dolmens, silo pits and metalwork. Later rooms cover the Phoenician and Punic centuries with imported ceramics, amulets, inscriptions and an anthropomorphic sarcophagus, and the Roman period. The Grand Salon on the first floor, the auberge's original refectory, is worth a minute in its own right: a long hall with a painted timber ceiling and a wide chimneypiece, used by the Union Club as its dining room and now given over to temporary exhibitions. Later phases of Maltese history, from the Arab and medieval periods onward, are covered elsewhere in the national collections rather than here, so the museum stops where the classical world does.

How to use it. Malta's prehistoric sites are exceptional, but on the ground several of them are eroded stone with the finds long removed. This museum holds what was removed. Going here before travelling out to Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra on the southern cliffs, or Ġgantija on Gozo, converts those visits from atmospheric ruins into something readable, because you will recognise the altar blocks, the figurines and the pottery in their original architectural context. Heritage Malta sells multi-site passes that make the combination cheaper than separate tickets. Allow an hour and a half; the collection is not enormous, but the labelling rewards slow reading, and the chronology is genuinely difficult to hold without it.

Getting there and timing. It is a five-minute level walk from City Gate up Republic Street, so this is one of the easiest sites in Valletta to reach, and every island bus terminates just outside the gate. The auberge is a historic building with stairs between floors. It is open daily with reduced hours on public holidays, and it is rarely crowded even when the Co-Cathedral opposite has a queue down the street, which makes it a sensible place to spend the middle of a hot afternoon. Photography without flash is generally permitted.