With access from Piazza de Valette or Merchant Street, the inner courtyard is open to all the visitors. It leads off to areas of sociability (the bookshop and the café), to areas where people gather together (the auditorium) and to the paid access areas (ticket office, temporary exhibition, access to the permanent collection on the first floor). It is also the starting point for a promenade that climbs upwards from the ground level to the city’s rooftops. Moving onwards and upwards, in a literal and figurative sense, often means preparing oneself for an experience that calls on emotion and understanding. In this way, we can seize issues that had at first seemed to be beyond us. Access to the terrace rooftop is free and visitors can treat it like a stroll. With a café, garden and a high promenade, it constitutes the accomplishment as much as a starting point of the visit. Visitors discover the surroundings of the MUZA, the major facilities in the area, Valletta Bay and beyond. They realise that the urban space is in fact the main public facility, a shared good that is in continual evolution. Areas near at hand and far away appear side by side, in an ceaseless to-and-fro movement.
