Domus Romana

Where it sits. The Domvs Romana occupies a small walled compound immediately outside Mdina's ditch, on the boundary between the walled city and Rabat, a two-minute walk from the main gate. The neoclassical pavilion that covers it looks like a modest garden temple, which undersells what it protects: the excavated remains of a wealthy townhouse of Roman Melite, with the finest mosaic floors surviving anywhere on the Maltese islands. The position matters. This ground was inside the Roman city, close to its civic centre, and the boundary of the medieval fortifications later cut straight through the ancient street plan, which is why a Roman aristocratic house now sits marooned in what feels like a suburban garden.

Found by accident. In 1881, workmen planting trees outside the Mdina ditch struck worked stone. The subsequent excavation, directed by Antonio Annetto Caruana, uncovered a peristyle courtyard ringed by Doric columns with mosaic floors of exceptional quality, along with marble statuary. The find was important enough that a purpose-built museum was raised over it the following year — the first purpose-built museum building in Malta — and replaced by the present neoclassical structure in 1922. Later campaigns extended the excavation into surrounding plots, though modern Rabat sits over most of the rest of the house.

The mosaics. The floors date to the late second or first century BC and belong to the Hellenistic tradition rather than to anything provincial. The central panels are worked in opus vermiculatum, tesserae cut small enough to render shading and reflection, and set within broad geometric surrounds of coarser tesserae. The best-known panel shows doves perched on the rim of a water bowl, a composition descended from a celebrated original by Sosos of Pergamon that was copied across the Roman world — the version at Pompeii is its most famous relative. Others use trompe-l'oeil borders that read as three-dimensional coffering. The technical level implies imported craftsmen and a patron with serious money, and taken together with fragments of marble statuary identified with the Julio-Claudian imperial family, it suggests a house connected to the imperial cult or to the civic elite that maintained it.

The Muslim cemetery on top. The second story told by the site is the one people arrive least prepared for. Long after the house was abandoned, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the ruins were reused as a burial ground by Malta's Muslim population. Excavators recorded a couple of hundred graves cut into the collapsed levels, many with carved tombstones bearing Kufic inscriptions, some of which name the deceased and give dates in the Islamic calendar. Several are displayed in the museum. Very little physical evidence survives of the two centuries of Muslim Malta that gave Mdina and Rabat their names, which makes these stones among the most valuable objects on the islands.

What you actually see today. The visit is compact. A single-storey museum surrounds the excavated peristyle, which is viewed from a raised walkway; cases hold the tombstones, amphorae, lamps, glass, coins and the statuary fragments, with panels explaining Melite's layout and the Roman administration of the islands. The mosaics are lit to raise the contrast in the fine work, and the doves panel is set out so it can be seen close to. It is a twenty to forty-minute visit, and it is best done before or after St Paul's Catacombs, since the two sites together tell the story of the Roman city from its living rooms to its cemeteries. Take a moment on the way out to look back at Mdina's wall from the garden: the ditch in front of you was cut across the Roman street grid roughly a thousand years after this house was abandoned, and standing at the junction of the two makes the sequence of Melite, medina and Rabat easier to hold in the head than any museum panel manages.

Getting there and timing. Walk out of Mdina's main gate, turn right along the ditch, and the entrance is on the left. Buses 51, 52 and 53 from Valletta reach Rabat in around 35 minutes. Heritage Malta runs the site and it is included in the multi-site pass; opening hours run through the middle of the day and finish in the late afternoon. The interior is largely on one level with a step or two at the door, so access is workable for most visitors though not perfectly smooth. Because it is indoors and shaded, it suits the hottest part of a summer day, and because it is small, it rarely feels crowded even when Mdina is full.