A Palace fit for… well, anyone really – GAY TIMES – Gay Times Magazine

So, is Mdina in Malta really like it comes over in Game of Thrones/Brideshead Revisited/Cutthroat Island/one of very many films and TV shows, you ask? Oh, you didn’t!

To answer the question you didn’t ask, yes. Perhaps even more golden, more historic, more picture-perfect. But it’s a funny one, Malta, isn’t it? For so long it was associated with older people, mainly because the Queen used to live there when she first got married and Prince Philip was stationed there as a Royal Navy officer. But in fact, most of the people we saw wandering the traffic-free streets of that ancient town as we tucked into delicious al fresco food at Xara Palaces’s ground-floor Trattoria AD 1530 were young. Very young.

And what traffic-free streets they are! You enter the town – tiny! – over a little drawbridge-type affair, the only vehicles allowed being those with very special permits, usually to deliver people like us to Xara and then get the hell out, which is why it’s called The Silent Town. Mdina itself stretches way back to Roman times but such has been the level of invasion from Phoenicians, Normans, Greeks, Arabs, Knights of St. John, even St. Paul washed up here (that’s why they need a moat, now gardens) that most of the buildings today are Baroque, golden in colour, fancy in ornament and as beautiful as all get go. You don’t get on the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites without being pretty darn gorgeous.

Wander round those silent streets (busy with tourists, mind), get a gelato (whatever happened to the word ‘ice-cream’?), take in the views all the way down to the capital Valetta and the sea from the city walls, visit the little museum of curios, step inside the beautiful church, icy as a cool box on a boiling day, photograph St. Paul’s Cathedral (actually, photograph everything!), browse the gardens and fountains in the old moat… It’s a truly gorgeous spot and it would only take a couple of hours to really explore.