Palazzo Falson

Where it sits. Palazzo Falson stands on Villegaignon Street near the northern end of Mdina, a two-minute walk beyond the cathedral square and a minute short of the bastions. It is easy to miss and easy to identify: a tall, austere facade of pale limestone pierced by paired arched windows with slender colonnettes, the Siculo-Norman detail that gives the building its other name, the Norman House. There is no forecourt and no fanfare — the door opens directly onto the street, which is how the medieval nobility of Mdina built. The house is generally reckoned the second oldest surviving building in the city.

Eight centuries of owners. The core is thirteenth-century, raised as a fortified townhouse when Mdina was Sicily's administrative outpost on the islands. A substantial enlargement in 1495 gave the palace its present street front and the carved windows. Local tradition holds that Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, the Grand Master who brought the Order of St John to Malta in 1530, lodged here on his first visit to the old capital before the knights settled at Birgu. The name comes from the Falson family, Maltese notaries and jurists who held it for generations; later owners included the Cumbo Navarra line, and the house appears in documents under several names, which is why nineteenth-century guides can be confusing about it.

The Gollcher collection. The last private owner was Captain Olof Frederick Gollcher, born in Malta in 1889 into a family of Swedish shipping origin. Artist, philanthropist and obsessive collector, he bought the palace in 1927, restored it and filled it with what amounts to several dozen distinct collections. His will left the house and its contents in trust; after a long restoration by Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti it opened as a historic house museum in 2007. The result is unusual among Maltese museums because nothing has been assembled for display purposes: the rooms are shown broadly as Gollcher left them.

What you actually see. The route takes in around a dozen rooms on two floors around two internal courtyards, one with a well cut into the rock. The armoury holds helmets, breastplates and edged weapons; other rooms hold silver, church plate, Oriental rugs, jewellery, coins and medals, paintings, clocks and a kitchen kept with its original range and copper. The library of roughly four and a half thousand volumes, some of them incunabula, is the quietest room in the house. Everything is labelled lightly and an audio guide is included with the ticket, which suits a building where the point is the accumulation rather than any single object.

Reading the facade. The street front repays a few minutes before going in. The paired arched windows, each divided by a thin colonnette and framed by a moulded hood, belong to the Sicilian Gothic tradition that reached Malta through Palermo, and they are the closest thing the islands have to a signature medieval detail; the same idiom appears down the street on Palazzo Santa Sofia and on a handful of houses in Birgu and Victoria. Note how few and how high the openings are. A fifteenth-century Mdina family built for security first, and the ground floor is almost blind. The masonry is coursed globigerina limestone with the deeply weathered, pitted surface that four hundred years of salt-laden wind produces, and restorers deliberately left that patina rather than recutting the stone.

The roof. The terrace café at the top is the reason to leave time at the end. It looks north and west over the bastions toward Mtarfa's ridge and the open country beyond, and because it sits above the street the noise of the city drops away entirely. Coffee and light lunches are served; the seating is limited and fills quickly on spring weekends.

Getting there and timing. Enter Mdina by the main gate, walk the length of Villegaignon Street past the cathedral, and the palace is on the left. Buses 51, 52 and 53 from Valletta reach Rabat in around 35 minutes, then it is a ten-minute walk in total. The museum charges a modest admission and closes in the late afternoon; last entry is usually about half an hour before. Allow an hour and a quarter, more if the library or the armoury detains you. The ground floor and courtyards are level, but the upper floor is reached by a stone stair without a lift, so access is partial. Photography rules are stricter here than at most Maltese sites, and the house is small enough that a large group arriving at once changes the atmosphere — early on a weekday is the way to see it as it should be seen.