Is this Florence or the West Bank? Inside the bizarre 'House of Palestine'

Andrea Valentino wins £200 for this account of a visit to the West Bank and a surprise invitation from one of the wealthiest families in Palestine.

There is a little bit of Italy in Nablus. Not that you can tell from the bus station. There, it’s all stinking exhaust pipes and boys selling tea in plastic cups, like every other town in the West Bank. But peer up the hill flanking the city, and you can just glimpse it. A perfect dome peeping from behind cypress trees, like a frightened puppy.

Slide back towards town in a pockmarked white taxi, as we did, and suddenly you see it fully. The steps: swelling up to the house like a wedding dress. The slender colonnades, supporting that ice-cream scoop dome. In Nablus, they call it the “House of Palestine”. But there is nothing Palestinian about it. It’s a copy of an Andrea Palladio masterpiece, near Vicenza.

“Who lives there?” asked my friend.

“Munib al-Masri,” explained the driver. “The richest man in Palestine.” He paused. “Would you like to visit?”

Halfway down the hill, we stopped at a blank green gate. The taxi driver got out. “Some foreigners are here and they’d like to see the house,” he told the intercom. A pause. The gate juddered and slid back. I began to undo my seat belt. The driver scoffed. “We still have some driving to do.”

Only at the end of a long gravel drive, lined on one side by gnarled olive trees and sprinklers, could we get out. We were met by Dina, al-Masri’s daughter. “Why do you want to see my father?” We didn’t, we explained. We were just curious about the house.

She was curious, too: her daughter wanted to study in Britain. So she showed us. The atrium is stark: empty except for a nude Renaissance sculpture. Above, the marble curdles all the way up to the dome. Dina caught us gaping. “The dome is 18 metres high. The original in Italy is only 14.” Joining the atrium are parlours, each named after a different Palestinian town. Baroque paintings and Persian rugs squinted up from behind pillars of dust as we stepped inside.

Then, there is the greenhouse. Napoleon III gifted it to a mistress. The wooden floors are original. The window panes aren’t: they were smashed out during the second intifada. “It was difficult to build this place,” said Dina. “Israeli troops were billeted here, and kids shot at them from the cypress trees, over there.” She flapped mildly down towards the town and the bus station.

It was time to leave. Next time, Dina promised, we could see the Byzantine chapel in the grounds. “But only if you help my daughter” We soon forgot about that. Balata, the local refugee camp, had exploded again. Gunfire echoed off the hillsides, so we hid inside all afternoon. The House of Palestine was still only a mile away.

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