Step into plague-stricken Valletta in 1593 on an immersive walking tour where history becomes part medical mystery, part political scandal and part very badly behaved humanity.

Your journey begins overlooking Malta’s Grand Harbour, where ships brought grain, spices, wealth and opportunity and eventually plague. From this moment, you are no longer simply visiting Valletta. Your guide becomes Dr Pietro Parisi, and you have just been recruited as his apprentice physicians. Your qualifications are modest: you are currently upright and, so far, showing no obvious buboes

Your mission is to discover not only how plague reached Malta, but why it was allowed to stay. And very quickly, you will discover that the bacteria had plenty of assistance.

Doctors deny the obvious. Politicians worry about commerce. Infected possessions disappear into the black market. Families hide sickness rather than lose everything to quarantine. Churches fill with frightened worshippers. Guards tasked with stopping contagion steal contaminated belongings themselves

Then there are the people. Meet troublesome knights, alleged practitioners of magic, connected with forbidden books, spells and rather suspicious bones. Encounter women accused of witchcraft, love magic and scandalous behaviour; hear of potions involving considerably more questionable ingredients; and discover how fear could turn gossip into evidence before the Inquisition. Meet prostitutes, their powerful clients and knights whose public morality sometimes differed rather spectacularly from their private behaviour

Would you remove a husband from his family because he might be infected? Burn a poor family’s possessions? Close churches? Stop trade? Lock people away? In Parisi’s world, every answer saves somebody and harms somebody else. There is no clean choice. Only consequences. Because by the end of the tour, you may discover that the plague was not the only disease stalking Valletta