Palazzo Falson

Behind an unassuming façade on Villegaignon Street, Mdina's principal artery, stands the second-oldest building still standing in Malta's former capital — a medieval palace that has passed through Norman, Sicilian, and Maltese noble hands before ending up, improbably, as the private collection of a 20th-century Swedish-Maltese adventurer. Palazzo Falson holds one of the richest small museum collections in the Mediterranean: 3,500 objects across 17 rooms, assembled not by a dynasty over centuries but largely by one man in one lifetime.

The building's origins reach back to the early 13th century, fashioned on Sicilian models as a two-storey family residence wrapped around an internal courtyard, with the principal living quarters on the piano nobile above. It passed through several noble names — Cumbo-Navarra, Casa dei Castelletti, the Norman House — before being inherited in the early 16th century by Vice Admiral Michele Falson, head of Mdina's town council, whose name the palace has carried since. The building's connection to one of the defining episodes in Maltese history came in November 1530, when Emperor Charles V's gift of Malta to the Knights of St John was formalized. Philippe Villiers de L'Isle Adam, the Order's first Grand Master in Malta, was received here by Maltese nobles after the ceremony in which he took formal possession of Mdina — a detail that ties this building directly to the moment the Knights of St John began their two-and-a-half-century rule over the island.

The palazzo's modern character owes almost everything to its last private resident. Captain Olof Frederick Gollcher O.B.E. (1889–1962) was a figure of Swedish descent who spent his life on Malta and spent that life, in considerable part, collecting. The resulting accumulation is extraordinary in its scope: paintings attributed to Mattia Preti, Jusepe de Ribera, Jakob-Ferdinand Voet, Charles Beale, and Juriaen van Streeck; silver, furniture, jewellery, Oriental rugs from across the Islamic world; European armoury; and a library of over 4,500 books and rare manuscripts that fills an entire room of the piano nobile. Gollcher was not simply a buyer — he was a researcher, artist, and philanthropist, and the collection reflects a personal, connoisseurial intelligence working across disciplines rather than institutional procurement driven by category or period. Forty-five distinct sub-collections spread through 17 rooms give the museum a density and variety that is unusual at this scale.

Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti (the Maltese Heritage Foundation) undertook a comprehensive restoration of the building and reopened Palazzo Falson as a public museum in May 2007. The self-guided visit, with an audio guide available in six languages and included in the entrance price, moves through the rooms in something close to their original domestic arrangement — visitors move through the palazzo as Gollcher lived in it, rather than through a gallery rearranged for display. The piano nobile rooms are particularly striking: the library, the armoury, the room with the Oriental rugs. The rooftop terrace and café offer views across Mdina's honey-coloured roofscape and out toward the Maltese countryside and the sea — a perspective available almost nowhere else in the city at this height without climbing a rampart.

Palazzo Falson sits within Mdina itself, the Silent City: Malta's walled former capital, a compact medieval and Baroque hill town of roughly 300 residents that has become one of the most visited heritage sites on the island, its stone-paved streets and honey-coloured palaces familiar to millions from their use as a filming location for Game of Thrones (it appeared as King's Landing in early seasons). The palazzo is one of several notable buildings along Villegaignon Street, alongside Palazzo Vilhena (now the Natural History Museum) and the Mdina Cathedral, and it works naturally as one element of a walking circuit of the old city — though it merits its own full visit rather than being reduced to a single stop on a busier itinerary.

Combine the palazzo with a walk of Mdina's ramparts for the views across the central Maltese plain and, if time allows, with a visit to Rabat immediately outside the walls — the Roman Domus Romana (a Roman townhouse with superb mosaics) and the catacombs of St. Paul and St. Agatha are within ten minutes' walk and together document Malta's exceptional depth of inhabitation, from Roman through early Christian to medieval.