The location of this apartment is genuinely perfect. It’s at the residential end of the Main Street in Valetta. It feels very much like you are amongst the locals, which is great! You can walk to Fort St Elmo (with amazing views of the Mediterranean) in 5 mins if you turn right out of the front door, and to the main square in 5 mins if you turn left (where the bars, restaurants and shops start). The location really is that good! There’s a small corner shop-type establishment within 1 minute’s walk, which has a great selection of drinks and essentials. We bought all our drinks from here because you don’t have to carry them far in the heat. You probably don’t want to do your main shopping here though. Instead head to the bottom floor of the food market, where there’s a high end supermarket with a much better selection of food, including a bakery. This is only about 10 mins away - great stuff!
The apartment is very nicely designed, and the big old window is a great place to sit and enjoy a drink and read a magazine. The kitchen is well equipped, the bed is comfortable, the linen was clean and smelled amazing, there’s great ambient lighting and a private entrance from the street (the door opens directly to a staircase as the apartment is on the first floor). The old stone arches are beautiful and really add to the feel of the place. The bathroom is compact, but perfectly functional and is perhaps looking a little tired now. This is my only slight criticism.
One of the things I worry about the most when I book somewhere is noise, so I always focus on this in reviews for other noise sensitive people! I’m delighted to say that this apartment passes the test - noise didn’t affect my enjoyment of the stay. You can hear occasional cars driving by at night through the single glazed window but this really didn’t prove to be a problem for us and didn’t wake us up once we’d dropped off (and I’m a light sleeper). The downstairs neighbours were an empty posh shop unit (currently being done up - but shouldn’t cause any issues when open - and the renovations didn’t disturb us at all) and the upstairs neighbours were fine on the whole. All you could hear was them pushing furniture around every now and then but they didn’t play loud music and you couldn’t hear heavy footsteps. Hooray! From wandering around Valetta, we realised how lucky we were to find a quiet apartment as it seems that many other streets suffered from neighbours with a penchant for late 90s/early 00s pop music. Despite the excellent location close to everything you want to get to, there is absolutely no noise at night from bars and people who’ve spent a little too long in bars. Massive tick!
Overall, I would definitely stay at Mickael’s place again and I would recommend it to my friends and any other couples who wanted to visit Valetta. Mickael’s communication is fantastic - he arranged for an airport transfer for us and messaged a few times to see if we needed anything. To me, he is the perfect host - clearly cares about his guests, but not interfering.
Thanks for a great stay!