Palazzo Parisio, Naxxar

Where it sits. Palazzo Parisio faces Victory Square in the middle of Naxxar, directly opposite the parish church of Our Lady of Victories, about eight kilometres northwest of Valletta. From the square there is almost nothing to see: a long, restrained façade of pale globigerina limestone with a modest entrance, the kind of frontage that in Malta usually conceals a courtyard and a staircase. That reticence is the point. Everything the house has to say is said inside and behind, in a suite of gilded rooms and in a walled formal garden that occupies more ground than the building itself.

The story behind it. The site began as a hunting lodge raised in 1733, in a period when the countryside north of Naxxar was open ground used for shooting, and it passed through several institutional uses over the following century and a half, including service as barracks and as a college. Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have lodged here during his brief stop in Malta in 1798, on his way to Egypt, in the days when the French took the island from the Order of St John. The building acquired the form it has now in 1898, when Marquis Giuseppe Scicluna — the founder of a banking fortune and one of the wealthiest Maltese of his generation — bought it and set about turning a plain country house into a statement of arrival. He brought in Italian craftsmen, added a piano nobile of state rooms, and had the interiors gilded, frescoed and marbled over roughly a decade. The result is a late-nineteenth-century Baroque revival, not an authentic Baroque palace, and the distinction matters: this is a Victorian-era banker's fantasy of aristocratic Malta, executed with more money than restraint.

Inside the house. Visitors move through a marble staircase hall into a sequence of rooms that includes the music room, the dining room set with family silver, a small chapel, and a ballroom whose ceiling, gilding and mirrors are the reason most people come. Details worth slowing down for: the trompe l'oeil painted ceilings, the Murano glass, the parquet floors laid in patterned inlays, the family portraits and the collection of period furniture that remains in situ because the house is still owned by descendants of the Scicluna family rather than by the state. Because it is a lived-in private property, the tour is compact and the rooms are shown as furnished interiors, not as a museum display with cases and labels.

The gardens. Behind the palace lies the element that most visitors end up preferring. The main parterre is laid out in the Italian manner with clipped box hedges in geometric beds, a central fountain, statuary and gravel walks, framed by palms and by a pergola. Beyond it are a sunken garden, an orange grove that scents the whole enclosure in late winter and early spring, and a shaded walk of mature trees that keeps the temperature down even in July. The planting is deliberately formal and symmetrical, which in Malta — where private gardens are usually small, walled and irregular — is itself unusual. A tea room and a restaurant open onto the terrace, and the garden is heavily booked for weddings and private functions, so parts can be closed at short notice.

What to know before going. The palace and gardens are open daily with a combined admission charge, typically with the last entry an hour or so before closing; house tours run on a fixed route and the gardens can be visited on their own for less. Photography is generally allowed in the gardens and restricted inside the state rooms. Allow ninety minutes for both, more if you stop for lunch. Access is partly stepped — the piano nobile is reached by the main staircase — so mobility-restricted visitors will manage the gardens and the ground floor comfortably but not the upper rooms.

Getting there and timing. Naxxar is well connected by bus from Valletta, Sliema and Mosta, and the palace is on the main square beside the stops; drivers should expect to park in the surrounding streets, which fill early. The gardens are at their best from late February to May, when the citrus is in flower and the beds are planted out; by August the parterre is holding on rather than performing, and the interior — cool, shuttered, and dim — becomes the better half of the visit. The building is floodlit during the September feast of Our Lady of Victories, when the square outside is decorated and closed to traffic, and the contrast between the noise of a Maltese festa and the silence of the walled garden behind the house is worth experiencing in a single evening.