This book marks the hundredth year from the official setting up of the museum by Dr Themistocles Zammit in 1903. It traces the main developments of Government owned museums and heritage sites from the very first recorded reference to a collection: that of Giovanni Francesco Abela in the first half of the seventeenth century, to the Cultural Heritage Act of 2002 which gave birth to three new institutions in the field of cultural heritage. Abelas collection was the nucleus around which the national 'collection' subsequently grew and developed.