Inquisitor’s Palace

The Inquisitor’s Palace is essentially both a historic house museum and the national ethnography museum. On its own merits, however, it may also be considered as a site since the building itself is an integral part of the experience being presented; a power-house of the Holy Roman Inquisition that dominated Malta for over 224 years. Built in around the 1530s, what today is known as the Inquisitor’s Palace initially housed the Magna Curia Castellania Melitensis, a civil tribunal established by Grand Master Juan de Homedes y Coscon in 1543, until the institution moved to the then-newly built Valletta in 1572. Two years later, Pietro Dusina arrived in Malta as its first Inquisitor and Apostolic Delegate of Pope Gregory XIII. Grand Master Jean de la Cassière offered him this building and thus it got the name still in use to date. Inquisitors in Malta served in their dual role as supreme judges of the Holy Office and Apostolic Delegates representing the Vatican’s interests in Malta. The Pala