For the place
The Xara Palace
Mdina · Malta
For a few hours each evening the Silent City earns its name. Mdina has held this hilltop since antiquity, a dense knot of honey-coloured limestone and baroque doorways that the day crowds walk through and then leave behind. The Xara Palace is the only hotel inside the walls, a 17th-century palazzo carried carefully back to its noble state and set right on the bastion, with the whole of Malta spread out below. Seventeen rooms, no two the same, furnished with the antiques, oil paintings and heavy Parisian cloth of a house that was once lived in rather than let. From the upper ones the view runs clear across the island to the sea. Downstairs the courtyard holds its cool, and the corridors are hung like a private collection.
On the roof, de Mondion holds a Michelin star and reads as the island's benchmark address: a short, serious menu eaten in the open air with the lights of Malta beneath you. Below it the Medina works a quieter register inside a medieval house of stone and timber, and out on the piazza the Trattoria A.D. 1530 takes the simpler Italian end of the day, tables set under the streetlamps once the gates fall quiet. You do not leave the walls to eat well here.
Malta has no shortage of hotels. Only one lets you stay after the gates close and have the oldest city on the island more or less to yourself, and that is the whole case for the Xara Palace. It is small, genuinely old, and it trades on a single fact that cannot be copied down the coast. Come for a night rather than a week, take a room high enough for the view, and walk the empty lanes after dark. The morning coaches will find you soon enough.
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