(I was astonished by the broken window I saw when I visited the city, because the hole between its cracks was so absolutely perfect an image of a flying crow. I took a lot of pictures of it, sure that what I was looking at was a happy accident.

On my second visit to the same neighbourhood, however, I stopped by a mattress warehouse. In one pane of its main window was a hole in the shape of a stylized gorilla, pounding its chest.

‘It’s a dying art,’ my guide said, when she realised what I was gawping at. ‘Today they do it on ladders, with very fine hammers. Back in the day the best practitioners used to pride themselves on being able to render pretty much any animal you ordered with a single thrown stone.’

Nowadays they mass-produce windows with careful perforations in the glass, so if you hit them right you’ll have your tiger, your trout, your dancing bear. In the church of the main square, the stained-glass head of Mary Magdalene—which was certainly not pre-prepared like that—is broken by a hole in the shape of a badger. It was a kid who did it, the priest said, 40 years ago, with one stone, one throw, the old way. He smiled when I asked him if he’d known the culprit, in such a way as to imply that it had been him.)