Letter From Tirana: Edi Rama, Tirana's mayor, is a great believer in the power of paint. A walk down the streets of the Albanian capital is like entering the pages of a child's colouring book.
Once-drab concrete communist-era apartment blocks have red, green and yellow splashed over them. A balcony is painted psychedelic blue, the wall a mix of canary yellow and knicker pink.
"Pride and confidence are the key elements in building a new Albania," says Rama, a large, rather intimidating figure, once a star of the national basketball team and nicknamed "The Bear" by the Tiranese.
"When I became mayor four year ago, Tirana was a drab, Stalinist-style city. The first thing I did was splash paint about, brightening things up. In the beginning, people objected, especially the elderly. Now they get annoyed if their building isn't given a strong, bold colour. It's changed the look of Tirana, it's cheap to do and, most importantly, it's given pride back to the population."
Albania is a mountainous country the size of Wales with a population of about 3½ million. When communism collapsed in 1991, the country was in a desperate state. For nearly half a century, under the stern regime of the dictator Enver Hoxha, people had been virtually sealed off from the outside world.
Hoxha based his rule on self-sufficiency and paranoia. To guard against a supposed invasion by western powers, he had thousands of concrete bunkers built throughout the country. These still litter the landscape - peering eerily down from mountainsides and out of olive groves like legions of hermit crabs.
For much of the 1990s Albania lurched from one crisis to another and more than a million people left in search of jobs. Average annual incomes are still only about €1,100 a year and there is high unemployment.
Yet it's not only the colour of Tirana's buildings which is changing. An estimated €1 billion - a figure equivalent to more than half the national budget - is sent back to Albania each year by workers overseas. And there is a construction boom.
In the mid-1980s there were only about 3,000 cars in the whole of Albania. Now Tirana's streets are choked with traffic. Some Albanians are returning from Greece and Italy and elsewhere in Europe to start businesses and rebuild their country.
"There's no doubt economic conditions are improving," says Fatos Nano, Albania's prime minister. "Our growth is strong and we're fighting corruption and tackling issues of gangsterism. I hope that before too long we can take our place within the European Union."
To many people, Mr Nano's EU ideas seem far-fetched. Brussels has repeatedly stalled signing a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with Albania, seen as the first step on the ladder to eventual EU membership.
EU officials have recently used uncharacteristically strong language about what they see as continuing high-level corruption in the country, and they have expressed concern about the activities of an increasingly well-organised and ruthless Albanian mafia in Europe. There are also worries about violence, intimidation and ballot-rigging in elections due to be held this summer.
For much of the post-communist era, politics in Albania has been dominated by Mr Nano and the leader of the main opposition party, Sali Berisha. Both men held senior positions in the old communist regime.
"I remember Berisha cutting the long hair off students at the university and telling them to get rid of their flared trousers," says Mr Nano. "He's nothing but an old communist."
"Nano and his cronies are all corrupt," says Dr Berisha, one of Albania's leading heart specialists. "He has not changed - on the surface he's a free-wheeling capitalist, but underneath he's still a Marxist-Leninist."
Many people feel that Albania does not have much hope of fundamental change while these two bitterly opposed political stalwarts are on the scene.
Edi Rama is seen as a possible future leader of the country, but he lacks a party organisation of his own and countrywide political experience. Tirana's flamboyant mayor also has enemies in both the business community and the political establishment. He has been shot at and receives regular death threats.
At one stage in the 1990s Mr Rama left Albania to go and paint in Paris. One of his main subjects was large female feet. "It was an obsession - I couldn't get enough of them," he says.
He was happily painting outsized toes and soles when his father - who had been an official sculptor under the old Hoxha regime - died.
"I came back for the funeral and realised I had to stay. You can't keep turning your back on your own home, however bad things are. Our whole history has been a story of humiliation. First there was 500 years of rule by the Ottomans, then nearly half a century of communism, followed by a decade of near-anarchy. Nothing will change if Albanians themselves don't have faith in their country and in its future."