Mdina Dungeons Museum

Having visited this museum, it is something of a surprise that enough people remained sufficiently alive and un-tortured to maintain the population on the island.  In the Mdina dungeons you are treated to various waxwork dummies in poses of extreme duress and agony, re-enacting scenes of some of the pretty hideous tortures that were metered out to people in days gone by, from the Romans up until Napoleon arrived and started trying to calm everybody down and introduce less blood-thirsty forms of judicial retribution.

I quite like this place, even though in the attempt to illustrate the horrors of the past, the parade of grimacing dummies becomes kind of desensitizing as one tableaux tries to out-gore the next.  They really go for the gruesome here: limbs are separated from bodies, bodies stretched out and hung up, pierced and sliced.  The models are not sufficiently life-like to make you feel really squeamish, although moans and wails are piped through the sound system as you walk around to try and ramp up the atmosphere.