Now is a good time to enter the tissues and handkerchief market. It seems that a good part of the country is awash with tears as people are crying over the decision to relocate the monti to the vicinity of Renzo Piano’s parliamentary building.

Antonio Belvedere, the architect supervising the works on the Parliament, set everybody off to Tearsville when he was reported as saying, “I am crying” and compared the situation to the heartrending awfulness of making a glorious cake and then spitting on it.

This distressing image and the upsetting prospect of spying a thong or two on a market stall within a 500-metre radius of the parliamentary building moved others to tears. Others told us why they were crying over the fate of Valletta, how absolutely awful it was to ruin the visual integrity of the building by allowing vendors to set up stalls close by.

On and on it went, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth like some sort of domino effect of despair as the arbiters of all that is elegant and iconic railed against the potential of nylon panties defiling their precious parliamentary building.

There was general lamenting about the lack of aesthetic qualities of the proposed stalls, their sheer utilitarian vulgarity, the mediocrity of anything related to the monti and of course – more sobbing. By the end of the week, it was as if everybody was jumping onto the ‘Je Suis un Crybaby Desolé’ bandwagon.

I’m not exactly enthused at the prospect of the market spilling over the upper end of Ordnance Street near the theatre site (though the lower end will do fine), but I don’t buy into this collective hysteria as to how the monti is somehow ‘defiling’ the capital city. I am especially irritated by those banging on about the visual integrity and retaining open spaces and not ruining either.

Where were they when the open spaces around Malta were being built over? For instance, I don’t recall these grave expressions of horror when the Tigné peninsula was being built up with monster tower blocks which blotted out the sunshine and replaced open spaces with an arid sorry excuse for a square.

And there wasn’t a whimper when the visual integrity (that phrase again) of the area was completely ruined making the view from Valletta a hideous one. What’s more, those monuments to mediocrity and lack of harmony are permanent, not stalls that can easily be dismantled.

I would say that the permanent defacing of an entire peninsula is far more offensive than a couple of stalls but it’s so much easier to vilify stall holders than whoever drew up the plans for the concrete canyons at Tigné.

It’s as if human activity is somehow dirty and not to be tolerated near the ‘sacred’ Parliament building

Maybe everybody should turn off the waterworks and put away their tear-sodden hankies and pause to think about what we really intend Valletta to be. The kind of words being bandied about seem to indicate a ‘look and don’t touch’ approach.

We keep on hearing how the stalls and the humans manning them will “pollute” and “contaminate” Valletta. It’s as if human activity is somehow dirty and not to be tolerated near the ‘sacred’ Parliament building.

That is to be maintained in its pristine condition, gawped at from afar (preferably by people with refined artistic sensibilities clad only in natural fibres).

This is the only way to retain the dignity of the capital (and hopefully to stop the monti-haters from bawling their eyes out).

Parliament before people – always. According to this vision of Valletta, humans are a noisy, messy, mediocre nuisance to be tolerated because they have this annoying habit of actually interacting and taking up space. It all looked so much neater in the photomontage.

I can’t think of an approach which can stifle Valletta further. People keep on talking about “injecting life” to the capital, but planting a building there – however iconic – is not going to do that if the whole set-up is hostile to organic human activity.

It obviously wasn’t intentional but that’s what the whole City Gate project has turned out to be – hostile to the very people who are the ones who give a city its sense of vitality.

However magnificent it is aesthetically – and I happen to think it is – it is going to be more of a mausoleum of good intentions than anything else, if it doesn’t allow for resident and visitor interaction.

The capital is alive in the morning because people flock there to attend court sittings, to sit and chat at coffee shops and to dine at restaurants and to shop. And they shop from all manner of outlets – even the monti.

Why has this suddenly become so infra-dig and so demeaning? Before anybody starts sniffing about what they do abroad, they should have a look at the markets in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori or Padua’s market in Piazza delle Erbe. Both are situated within the historic quarters and the stalls are simple white awnings. There are the same white canvas awnings at the Barcelo flea market in Portugal.

They are buzzing with people and activity. That’s because people have been allowed to congregate and to mingle and do what comes naturally instead of being hived off out of sight in line the top-down, elitist approach which is characterising the discussion about Valletta. I can’t help thinking that this ‘keep-off-the-grass, plebs-keep-out, look-don’t-touch, high-end goods only’ message is making for an engineered, alien, bland and uninteresting Valletta. The moaning minnies can keep it.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt