[Daphne – There are plenty of old photographs and drawings available of the old entranceway to Valletta, from the inside of the city, showing the structures and buildings that were where Freedom Square and that shopping complex are now. The feeling you get looking at them is, as Piano remarked, one of ‘intensity’, almost claustrophobia.]

[Daphne – It was designed by an architect who had never visited the site and had no idea what it looked like. And so it was entirely unsuitable in terms of proportion. Also, because the architect was unaware that there was an incline, the civil engineers who actually supervised the building had to stick the opera house on a kind of semi-plinth that was never intended to be there. This plinth is the only thing that has survived. You think of it as imposing because, like me, all you know of it is from photographs taken from a higher point. The reality is that a facade of that nature was entirely in the wrong scale for such a narrow road crammed with buildings. It demanded a vast esplanade or square before it, which is indeed the case with similar buildings and grand opera houses in the cities that the Yes to an Opera House tribe like to cite. Freedom Square wasn’t there: there was a solid row of buildings all the way from the gate. On the other hand, the old opera house was very much of its time, which is why I find the arguments against a contemporary building by Renzo Piano and for a replica of the old thing utterly ridiculous and illogical. The old thing was of its time. Whatever is built instead of it must be of its time, too.]