It's not every day you get to look round a house which the Queen once wanted to live in. The 450-year-old Villa Parisio in Malta, though charming and interesting historically, is not grand, certainly not by royal standards. But the Queen, then a newly married Princess Elizabeth with a naval husband stationed on the island, apparently thought it would be just right for them.
The owner, however, although a friend of the couple, declined to hand it over.
The redoubtable Mabel Strickland, newspaper owner and editor and MP, was not a woman in thrall to anyone: during the Second World War she had had the governor of Malta removed from office because he was about to surrender to the Germans.
We have heard this story during our tour of the villa with Ms Strickland's nephew the sculptor Robert Strickland who also shows us other fascinating memorabilia including a collection of all the Royal Family Christmas cards Ms Strickland received over the years. She had remained friends with the Queen and Prince Philip and sent them a basket of oranges and avocados from the villa gardens every year until her death in 1988.
Our visit is part of the Private Malta experience. All the residences have been picked for their historic connections, their noteworthy architecture or their art collections and for the insights they offer into different aspects of Maltese life. For a nosey-parker like me it's the perfect opportunity not just to see behind the scenes but to get a real feel for people's lives.
package: Private Malta tours start from £1,500 per person based on four nights (five days) in a double room at the five star Corinthia Palace Hotel and Spa. The trip includes lunch and dinner daily with a special farewell dinner at a palazzo with transfer by classic cars; visits to five residences, guided tours and, depending on the season, a yacht trip, cooking in a private home or an afternoon in private gardens with such activities as archery and boules. private.malta@corinthia.com corinthia.com BOOK: visit beyond3sixty.com FLY: Air Malta flights start from around £110 return airmalta.com MORE INFO: visitmalta.com
So in Mdina, for instance, we wander around an impressive property packed with the treasures noble families accumulate over the generations: weaponry, suits of armour, ancestral portraits, collections of Venetian glass and "guinea clocks" (so called because that's what they originally cost), and a table which once belonged to Napoleon. Many of the spaces seem chilly and dark, the atmosphere heavy with the responsibility of being the custodian of all that tradition, so it is a nice contrast to get a glimpse of the owner's small cluttered bedroom and cheery sitting room.
Mdina, once the island's capital, is perched on a rock nearly 400 feet above the countryside. It has glorious views, labyrinthine cobbled streets and a gate set in fortified walls so impressive that they were the setting for King's Landing in the first series of Game of Thrones.
Malta probably has more history - and pre-history - per square foot than almost anywhere in the world. It stretches for over 7,000 years from Neolithic temples older than the Pyramids through conquest and occupation by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Ottomans, Spain, France and Britain. The latter's influence is still felt in familiar things like red letter boxes, driving on the left, shops like Marks and Spencer and Debenhams and the fact that English is the other official language.
One of the biggest influences though was the Order of St John whose knights were on the island for 268 years first as hospitallers for pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land - their medical skills were the most advanced in Europe - and later as a formidable fighting force. They built forts, watch towers, aquaducts, churches and cathedrals but their most spectacular achievement was the 16th century walled city of Valletta, the first ever to be laid out on a grid system.
Sights such as the Co-Cathedral with its astonishingly ornate interior and the Caravaggio masterpiece The Beheading of St John, this golden limestone Unesco World Heritage site though busy with tourists, have for many years been low on actual residents. Recently, however, there have been an increasing number of people restoring old properties, an example of which we visit on our tour.
The 400-year-old house was a ruin, the German-born owner tells us, when he and his Maltese partner bought it seven years ago. Today with its elegant art-filled salons and internal courtyard with carp pond it is a monument to their painstaking investment of time and resources: it is almost impossible to tell what is original and what reproduction.
Beautiful and tasteful as the house is, I find I'm almost as impressed by a giant floor- to-ceiling scratching post and the extraordinary construction all over the kitchen walls of a series of shelves and walkways for the couple's mancoon cats.
Equally idiosyncratic is the massive collection of giant cacti on the roof terrace where we drink the local orange and herbs soda pop Kinnie and look out across the Grand Harbour to the three cities across the water.
This area, the site of the knights' original capital, comprises the three old fortified cities of Vittoriosa, Senglea and Cospicua where we have dinner on our first evening in the home of British ex-pat Jim Dunn and his partner Arthur Whieldon who are similarly fervent in their love of old properties. They have knocked two 300-year-old town houses together to make a five bedroom pallazzino or small palace filled with the art and artefacts they have collected over four decades of world travel.
"We're still finding things out about the house," says Dunn. "Apparently one of the rooms was specially set aside for giving birth. We've also learned that one of the former residents used to write love letters in English from the local women to the British sailors based here."
Some of the properties included on the tour might already be open to the public but Private Malta guests will be given certain privileges. Only the grounds of the Villa Bologna, for example are open to the public; Private Malta guests are taken into the house itself, one of the finest baroque villas on the island and still lived in by the descendents of the original owners.
Similarly, at the Palazzo Parisio they can have dinner and musical entertainment after this "mini Versailles" is closed for the day.
The trip will also include a special wine tasting in the Marsovin cellars, a luxury yacht tour of the harbour and customised visits to many of the main attractions: an art historian, for instance, would come with you to the cathedral after hours.
