I am so proud of Malta and its people. I was born and partly raised here, and now am privileged to live here. My respect is huge for a people who after 2,000 years of control by various outside powers still have their own language, culture and traditions.
Where else on Earth of similar size can make such claims? I love to show visitors my island home, for them to see and appreciate it all.
Entrance to Valletta should be a great event. First impressions last. This is a World Heritage City, but City Gate visitors meet an empty featureless square and the weathered bones of the Opera House ruins.
Symbolically, Paris has the Eiffel Tower, Sydney its own Opera House...
Can you imagine such places without them? Valletta had an opera house, once one of Europe's finest. It can and should have it again, a symbol of Malta and its confidence in itself.
This has had a long history. Recent press letters have again appeared for and against latest proposals from the Caravaggio Foundation and local interested parties to rebuild the opera house as a multi-purpose opera and arts exhibition forum.
They begin with a total glass building (as did London's Crystal Palace over 150 years ago), round which a later stone façade can be added, to echo if not replicate the original Barry Opera House exterior.
Once again the vision seems to be becoming lost in arguments over personal pride and secondary detail.
I would beg all to come together, to make the latest vision happen. I have been to the exhibition of latest plans and models at St John's Cavalier. Please go yourself.
Costs are not astronomical, and I understand that building and maintenance expenses would be mainly met by private business and sponsors.
The result will be a sight to once again grace and enhance the entrance to this world city, and give Valletta and the Maltese people something of the 21st century to reflect the pomp of the 19th and the presence of Caravaggio here in the 17th.
So, politicians of all parties, please come together for the common good and, united, support this long overdue renaissance.
The Maltese people love opera, as any visit to a band club on opera nights proves. They also have a pride in the works left behind by Caravaggio and by their own builders and stone masons.
All would be fully represented in this phoenix rising from the ashes. Its rebirth would be a tribute to Maltese arts and cultural traditions, would honour Maltese world class opera singers, and would be a cause for cruise ship and other visitors to Il-Belt to enter and stop in wonder to admire the sight of the reborn opera house.
It could come to represent the new Valletta. Surely with such a vision on the horizon, all politicians and people of good will should bury old petty differences, and unite to make it a reality.
There is everything to gain in showing the world that small, dynamic and proud Malta and its people are a force to be reckoned with.
The present proposals make good artistic, architectural and commercial sense, in other words win-win all round.
Time for our politicians and civic leaders to make it happen please...you know in your hearts and in your wallets that it makes sense, and your people will thank you for it.