Explore Victoria: the Cittadella's Painted Dome & It-Tokk

Inside the Cittadella, the Cathedral of the Assumption carries one of Gozo's best architectural tricks: its ceiling, entirely flat, is painted in trompe-l'œil to simulate a dome the cathedral never actually got — the funds for a real dome ran out during construction, and the eighteenth-century fix was to paint the illusion instead. It's convincing enough from the floor below that most visitors need to be told it isn't real. The effect stands in genuine contrast to Mosta's Rotunda across on the main island, whose dome is very much real and among the largest unsupported domes anywhere — two very different eighteenth and nineteenth-century solutions to the same ambition.

It-Tokk, officially Independence Square, is Victoria's genuine social centre rather than a staged attraction — a market square that has hosted trading for centuries and still runs a lively morning market, ringed by cafés filled with locals rather than tour groups. The town is also the centre of Gozo's own craft traditions: bizzilla, the island's distinctive handmade lace, and traditional basket weaving, both still practised by local artisans and sold from workshops and stalls around the town rather than mass-produced for the souvenir trade.

A short walk from the Cittadella, the Basilica of St George holds a richly Baroque interior that rivals the Cathedral's own, and hosts one of Gozo's biggest annual festas each July — statue processions, band clubs and fireworks filling the streets around it. It's a genuine second draw in Victoria, proof that the town's interest runs well past the fortress walls that most day-trippers come specifically to walk.