Volume 52, Number 20 · December 15, 2005
The Floor of Floors
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Memento Mori: A Companion to the Most Beautiful Floor in the World
by Dane Munro, with photographs by Maurizio Urso
Malta: MJ Publications, two volumes, 520 pp., H250.00
Most visitors to Malta arrive at Valletta, Malta's sixteenth-century capital, where they go first to the golden limestone church now known as the Co-Cathedral of St. John.[1] They come to see the paintings by Caravaggio, particularly the powerful Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, and the exotic decorations of the building itself: the carved limestone piers, painted limestone vaults, sculpted tombs, Baroque metalwork, and a floor literally carpeted with hundreds of tombstones, all worked in elaborately inlaid marble.
Review, 3478 words
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