Valletta welcomes you to <i>Notte Bianca</i>

Tonight will yet again see Valletta being used as Malta's main stage of culture and leisure. Notte Bianca - Lejl Imdawwal aims to reflect the beauty of Valletta's cultural heritage to the people through the performing arts, both indoor and outdoor.

Over the past few years, Valletta has been experiencing a revival in cultural events and entertainment, reacquiring its true definition of a city of culture and moving from the traditional cultural calendar to a calendar of events for all months, seasons, spaces and forms.

Notte Bianca will continue to build on the cultural strategy for the city which seeks to make it worthy of its name, by putting on events for the people throughout the year.

It is this strategy which is attracting investment in leisure events from businesses - the coffee shops, wine bars and restaurants that offer excellent service throughout the day. Today Valletta can boast of having more than one thousand restaurant covers and more when one considers wine bars and cafés, most of them catering for night-time activity.

Valletta has come a long way over the past years. The gradual, yet strong increase in cultural and leisure events has rendered outdated the comment that Valletta is a dead city at night.

The Malta Summer Arts Festival, covering all of August and mainly held in the ruins of the Royal Opera House, the Flamenco Festival organised on Customs Quay, the Delicata Wine Festival at the Upper Barrakka, the Bank of Valletta Streets Alive on Republic Street and elsewhere, the Strada event on Strait Street and South Street, and the Film Festival on the Bastions of Valletta were just a few of the cultural and leisure events held in the summer months that have, together, attracted close to 100,000 visitors to Valletta by night.

Notte Bianca alone will stage some 50 events in more than 40 venues in one night, in all four corners of the city. It will bring artists, musicians, restaurateurs, shop owners and the people together - a festival for all the family. It will offer visitors the well-established Valletta Military Tattoo, exhibitions, concerts, drama, music from sacred to pop and jazz, walking tours, light installations, human animations, films and other shows.

Above all, Notte Bianca will offer a stage not only for the performing artists but also for the people themselves to converge and meet in and around one of Malta's richest cultural settings and environments - the city of Valletta.

The secret to bringing Valletta back to life has been the synergy created by getting all the stakeholders together to offer good quality cultural and leisure events.

The Valletta Local Council, the Ministry of Culture, the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts, the Malta Tourism Authority, the Valletta Alive Foundation and the business community at large, the Manoel Theatre, St James Cavalier, the MITP and the Mediterranean Conference Centre have, more than ever, joined forces to put Valletta in the driving seat as a living centre of culture and the arts.

But most of all it is the people who have put Valletta back into top gear, inspiring the stakeholders to do more.

Welcome to Valletta. Welcome to Notte Bianca.

Dr Borg Olivier is mayor of Valletta.