The Limestone Letter - 26 October 2026

The clocks went back on Sunday, and this evening the light will be gone before most of us have left work. It catches me out every year. Summer in Malta doesn't end when the calendar says it does. It ends on the first walk home in the dark, when you realise the island has changed gear without telling anyone.

The sea is still warm. At noon the sky is still absurdly blue. But the evenings belong to the people who live here again. Crossing from Birgu by harbour taxi yesterday under a moon one night short of full, with Valletta lit up across the water, I found I didn't miss August at all.

The car clock is now an hour fast. It will stay that way until March, when it quietly becomes right again. Enjoy your cosy evenings.

Halfway along Triq ir-Repubblika in Victoria, two opera houses stand about 200 metres apart. The Aurora belongs to the Leone band club, the Astra to La Stella. Both clubs were founded in 1863, and their rivalry is older than either building: La Stella plays for St George in July, Leone for the Assumption in August, and in Gozo that is not a small difference.

On Thursday the Astra raises its curtain on Madama Butterfly, its first since 2012. It's a pointed choice. The first opera ever staged in Gozo was Butterfly, at the Aurora, on 7 and 8 January 1977, and the Aurora is spending this year marking its fiftieth birthday. If anyone on Republic Street thinks the timing is a coincidence, they're keeping it to themselves.

The better story is behind the proscenium. For 30 years the Astra's sets have been designed by Joseph Cauchi, and the theatre is marking it with an exhibition, The Scenographer's Opera. Cauchi was born in Gozo and trained at the Tarġa Gap School for Craftsmanship in Mosta under the sculptors John Bonnici and Anthony Calleja. He has done decorative work in localities across the island, and at the Astra he leads a scenography team of volunteers.

That last word matters. Gozitan opera works because the principals are professionals brought in, while the chorus, the extras, the costumes and the scenery are made locally by people with day jobs. The results travel. Cauchi's Nabucco set was used for two performances in Rimini in 2015. In 2021 his Cavalleria Rusticana, built with Andrew Portelli, went to Sicily, where the Coro Lirico Siciliano staged it at the Greek theatres of Taormina, Tindari and Syracuse and in Catania's Villa Bellini. Malta sends a great many things to Sicily. Painted Gozitan backdrops are not usually among them.

Anyone who has tried to get something built in Malta knows the usual story: delays, permits and contractors who stop answering. On one street in Victoria, two clubs of unpaid enthusiasts stage full-scale grand opera every autumn, and have done for the best part of 50 years, largely because neither will be outdone by the other. Rivalry, it turns out, is a perfectly good project management system.

Butterfly plays on Thursday 29 and Saturday 31 October at 7:30pm, with Celine Byrne as Cio-Cio-San, Leonardo Caimi as Pinkerton, Sanja Anastasia as Suzuki and Vladimir Stoyanov as Sharpless. Seats run from €55 to €100. Dress up; Victoria will. The exhibition is free and open daily at the Astra from 9am to 9pm until Saturday, and the theatre runs a free backstage tour at 11am on Thursday. Check the late ferry before you book anything else.

Budget day: what's already on the table.

Clyde Caruana presents Budget 2027 to Parliament this evening, with the speech expected from 6:30pm. It is the first budget since May's general election, and a fair amount of it is already known. The pre-Budget document puts energy and food subsidies at €391.7 million this year and about €400 million in 2027, and the minister has said fuel and electricity prices stay protected. He has signalled a cost-of-living adjustment of around €5 a week, with the final figure confirmed tonight. On Sunday the Prime Minister promised pensioners an extra €10 a week, and from 2027 every pensioner reaches the full €21.53 weekly cost-of-living bonus phased in since Budget 2025. MaltaToday also reports that pensioners will be able to transfer NI contributions to a spouse with no pension of their own.

The warning sign came early. MaltaToday reports that private hospitals have been told by email that the scheme sending minor emergency cases away from Mater Dei is suspended while the Finance Ministry reviews spending across government. When a finance minister starts talking about restraint, believe him. We'll cover what touches your rent, tax and bills next Monday.

The hornet plan arrives, a season late.

The government has approved a €1 million national plan against the oriental hornet, after a year in which beekeepers reported losing up to 70% of their hives. One lost 16 colonies, more than in his previous 13 years combined. The seven measures include per-colony compensation for commercial beekeepers, help to rebuild with a share of native Maltese honeybees, research into trapping and nest tracking, and a nest-destruction service concentrated in February and March, when new queens found their colonies.

A national hotline for reporting nests is promised, but no number had been published when we went to press. Six beekeeping and bee-conservation groups, including the Foundation for the Conservation of the Maltese Honey Bee, welcomed the plan but want to know how the €1 million is split and how many replacement colonies must be native bees. For residents the useful part is the dull one: hornets follow food scraps, so keep organic waste sealed (let's not mention the cat food on every corner), and leave any nest you find well alone.

€70,000, eight days and a fake Prime Minister.

In November 2023 a 45-year-old man watched about €70,000 of his savings leave his Bank of Valletta accounts in eight days. He had seen a Facebook video of the Prime Minister and a journalist apparently promoting an investment scheme. It was fake. A customer who usually withdrew €100 at a time was suddenly emptying his accounts into cryptocurrency platforms, and nothing at the bank stopped it.

The Arbiter for Financial Services found that BOV had failed in its duty to monitor his payments and ordered it to compensate him in part. Last week the Court of Appeal threw out the bank's appeal. According to MaltaToday, had the bank's systems kicked in as they should, he would probably have lost only the first €5,000. Two lessons. No politician in Malta is selling you crypto on Facebook. And if your bank lets an obvious fraud run, the Arbiter is the route, and the courts now expect banks to notice.

66 days to keep the old tax terms.

If you came to Malta on a special tax status, or plan to, the calendar matters. From 1 January, Legal Notice 195 of 2026 folds the Global Residence Programme, The Residence Programme, the Malta Retirement Programme and the UN pensions scheme into a single Individual Tax Programme. The 15% rate on foreign income remitted to Malta survives. Almost everything else gets dearer: the minimum annual tax for global and EU residents rises from €15,000 to €35,000, retired pensioners go from €7,500 plus €500 per dependant to a flat €15,000, the property threshold becomes €700,000 to buy or €14,000 a year to rent, and the application fee is €8,500.

Statuses already granted, and applications submitted by 31 December, stay valid on the current terms until the end of 2031. None of this touches ordinary employees taxed through a Maltese payslip, or the Malta Permanent Residence Programme. If it touches you, see your adviser in November. December in Malta is not a month for paperwork.

On Sunday 1 November Malta keeps All Saints, Jum il-Qaddisin, and on Monday 2 November All Souls, l-Għid tal-Erwieħ, the feast of the souls. Neither is a public holiday. Both still shape the island more than Halloween, which took hold here only in the last couple of decades and has been absorbed the way Malta absorbs most things: enthusiastically, and without anyone giving up what was there before.

Gozitans call November ix-xahar tal-mejtin, the month of the dead. That sounds bleak until you pass a confectioner's window. From now until December they fill with għadam tal-mejtin, dead men's bones: pale, bone-shaped biscuits of sweet pastry around an almond filling, sold everywhere from countryside pastry shops to the stalls by the Valletta bus terminus. Their origins are hard to pin down, but the recipe is close to that of figolli, the Easter biscuits, which suggests they may go back to the seventeenth century. Nobody makes them in October, and nobody makes them in December. That's the point.

The older customs were stranger, and kinder. Weeks before All Souls, a well-off resident would buy a pig, tie a bell round its neck and let it loose in the village. Neighbours heard it coming and fed it scraps. On All Souls it was slaughtered and the meat shared among the poor: il-ħanżira tal-erwieħ, the sow of the souls. Children left out a cloth napkin and found sweets wrapped in it in the morning, is-sarvetta tal-erwieħ. Villages and religious communities boiled up soup for the poor. Charity and remembrance were the same act.

The practical part. All Saints falls on a Sunday this year, so churches will be fuller than usual. Next Monday families visit the graves, and the Addolorata in Paola, the country's largest cemetery, designed by Emanuele Luigi Galizia and in use since 1872, takes the heaviest traffic. If you can avoid driving through Paola that day, do. If you want to understand where you live, walk the Addolorata on a quiet weekday instead; its family chapels say more about Maltese history than most museums.

Look out, too, for torta tal-qargħa ħamra, the November pumpkin pie of rice, tuna and black olives in shortcrust, which Gozitans insist tastes as good as it looks.

What lingers is the tone. A biscuit shaped like a bone is a small joke about mortality, and the whole island is in on it. You eat one, you think for a moment about someone you've lost, and then you have a second.

Rubino, Valletta

Rubino opened at 53 Old Bakery Street in 1906 as a Sicilian restaurant and pastry shop, and the best thing about it is how little it has tried to become anything else. There is no printed menu. The day's dishes go up on a blackboard and the owner talks you through them. On a first visit, let that happen rather than pretending you know what you want.

Order the fenek moqli, rabbit braised in red wine with a sweet-and-sour finish, which Michelin's inspectors single out. If the house-smoked octopus on carrot purée is up, start with it. Then the cassata siciliana, made here since the shop opened. It is the reason the building exists, and you should not leave without it, however full you are.

Three small, traditional rooms, with the original interiors kept. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and sits in the guide's €€ band. Not for anyone who wants a view, a terrace or a dish that will still be there next week.

Lunch Monday to Friday, 12:30 to 2:30pm; dinner Monday to Saturday, 7 to 10:30pm; closed Sunday. It is small, popular and a few steps from St John's Co-Cathedral, so book ahead by phone on +356 2122 4656. It takes no bookings through the Michelin site.

LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET - Tuesday 27 October, Verdala Palace, Buskett. A poetry evening at 6:30pm opens this year's Three Palaces Festival, themed Once Upon a Time; tickets from €15.

ORA SINGERS: GOLDEN AGES - Thursday 29 October, St John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta. The festival's choral night, sung inside the Co-Cathedral at 6:30pm; tickets from €20.

MADAMA BUTTERFLY - Thursday 29 and Saturday 31 October, Teatru Astra, Victoria. Puccini at 7:30pm, with the free Scenographer's Opera exhibition open daily; see The Story.

LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS - Thursday 29 October to Sunday 1 November, Teatru Manoel, Valletta. Masquerade's staging of the Menken and Ashman musical about a florist and a very hungry plant closes its run on Sunday.

SOFT WEAPONS - Saturday 31 October, Grand Master's Palace, Valletta. An interdisciplinary, multisensory Three Palaces performance for over-18s only, in three sessions at 5pm, 6:15pm and 7:30pm; tickets from €20.

ALL SAINTS' DAY - Sunday 1 November, parish churches across Malta and Gozo. Jum il-Qaddisin opens the month of the dead; see The Expat Edit.

POSTCARDS FROM MALTA: JAZZ AND TIMPANA - Sunday 1 November, Auberge d'Aragon, Valletta. The Three Palaces closes with live jazz and timpana, the baked macaroni pie, at 7:30pm; tickets from €15.

Since January, the MCAST Library on the college's main campus at Corradino Hill, Paola, has lent books to the public. Join the Friends of the MCAST Library scheme with a form at the circulation desk or by email to [email protected] and you get a card and borrowing rights to more than 65,000 physical titles: history, biography, fiction and Maltese novels, plus DVDs and magazines from National Geographic to BBC Good Food. It's on the second and third floors of the MRC building, open weekdays from 7:15am to 5pm.

Low twenties all week, mostly sunny until Thursday, then a chance of showers from Friday into the weekend, which matters mostly to small skeletons on doorsteps. The sea is still around 23 degrees, so swimming season is over only for people who weren't swimming anyway.

Be honest: how many of your Maltese neighbours could you name without checking the doorbell?

Hit reply - we read every response.

Ħadd ma jaf x'hemm fil-borma ħlief il-mgħarfa - nobody knows what's in the pot except the ladle. Said whenever someone claims to know another family's business, and never more apt than on Budget day, when the whole island has an opinion on a pot only one minister has stirred.