I love the way any possible change to our capital city causes an absolute furore. It’s a good sign, this civic pride, and shows that for all our warts as a nation we do, at least most of us do know, that we have a gem of a capital city, gives us great pleasure whether we are just heading in for a cappuccino and chat cum gossip, or darting in and out of all the little shops cum shopping arcades with cinema, or as we are doing far more frequently, thanks to a fabulous and well-organised Arts Festival this year, attending another cultural event there.

First we had various proposals on how to re-use the Opera Site, many of them very pricey and most of them disliked by the public at large. Those plans appear to have been quietly shelved.

Then the hue and cry over some fancy paving at Castille, on which more later because I want to dedicate some time both to the very successful team of people who have made the Arts Festival this year a great success, as well as the staging of dance company Alegria’s Carmen in the Opera House ruins last Friday and Saturday night.

Rosana’s (the artist who produced, choreographed and so much more) Carmen was not only great fun to watch. It gave us all, in blazing reds, whites and blacks the solution we have all been too blind to see in terms of reusing the Opera House ruins.

It was the idea of the Arts Festival organisers to use this site for a brio of a production which combined ballet and flamenco, drama and desire. How could we have missed it for so long?

Let’s just use these ruins as a venue for open air theatre, landscape Freedom Square so you enter Valletta into a sea of green, and for very little money and a lot of flair give us all a solution which reflects us as a very, very young and still inexperienced nation.

A nation that now loves its greenery, a nation that is just starting to enjoy its talents and its theatre, (this time prodded by a South African national called Rosana in love with Spanish dance), a nation that is deservedly proud of one of the few built-as-one capital cities in the whole of Europe, and still surviving and thriving as such today.

Carmen was great fun, but especially so because it was danced, dramatised and sweated under a cool night sky. The atmosphere just wouldn’t have been the same if it was held in the Manoel, or the Mediterranean Conference Centre.

In fact it is clear that from now on the Opera House ruins could become far more of a cultural hub. Our great weather means open air theatre cum music cum dance is possible to stage here for most of the year, and since the site was originally a theatre anyway, we couldn’t be respecting its heritage and story more if we tried.

A few metres up the road is Castille. We have some proposals to remove the trees and monuments and create something grander.

Thousands who answered a poll on this one rejected the idea, presumably even before seeing what was proposed.

We are all simply saying no to any more trees disappearing. The new environmental awareness that has arisen means that we cannot tolerate any more loss of greenery, particularly in our urban cores where we are desperate for more, and what a pity too that the Council in Senglea removed a few trees in the heart of the town square, to replace them with car parking.

What is this gross obsession with car parking anyway? Even where I live in Naxxar they want to build a car park in what is a wide area of road when there are no parking problems at all in the area?

Presumably the only people who could benefit from this are the wedding establishments nearby, but they can jolly well go to the expense of having an underground car park if they need more space without making everywhere car parking land?

Luckily the residents got a chance to have their say (were the Senglea residents asked for their say?) and I must say the response from the Council to our objections was the height of politeness and humility with words, to the effect that they will listen to local concerns and let’s hope they do.

Back to our capital city, and there too, the grand plans look like they might be shelved. The whole issue there was around the difference between a bird’s eye view of how Castille would look with this fancy paving which is great, coming up against the views of people with their feet on the ground who like to look around and see trees even if they do mask Castille a little bit. So yes improve the paving if we need to but leave all the greenery intact.

It might have been Rosana’s Carmen that wowed and moved us all on Friday and Saturday night, and showed us how to reuse the old Opera House ruins.

But it is our Castille that we feel passionate about too and about keeping its green feel. More green and less grand is where we are at as a nation, and that feel is getting stronger and stronger by the day.

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