The war shelters
Cut into the rock by the residents' own hands.
Continentaleurope โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Frank Vincentz โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Frank Vincentz โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Frank Vincentz โ CC BY-SA 3.0
Entirely different: the palace is official and grand, this is intimate and explains how people actually lived. For lovers of social history it is the more enjoyable, and an hour covers it.
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A Maltese noble house still lived in: Casa Rocca Piccola was built in 1580 for an Italian knight and has belonged to the de Piro family for centuries โ the ninth Marquis lives on its upper floors today while twelve of its rooms are visited by guided tour, so the furniture, silver, paintings and costumes are not museum pieces but a family's possessions, in use. The tour tells the daily life of the noble class: the dining room with its porcelain, the bedroom with its canopied bed, the library, eighteenth-century dress, even the sedan chair. A charming detail: the hand-cranked kitchen lift and the servants' register. And beneath the house a surprise: Second World War shelters the residents cut into the rock themselves, which saved hundreds of neighbours, visited as part of the tour โ the house alone condensing Malta's history from the Knights to the bombing.
Cut into the rock by the residents' own hands.
A 'sedia volante' from the Knights' era.
Triq ir-Repubblika 74, Valletta