Saint-Pierre

This guide to Saint-Pierre in Bordeaux looks up at the mascarons, the carved stone faces staring down from shopfronts and window ledges around the old market square, and asks how a city carved three thousand of them while losing track of almost every name behind the chisel. It follows the word itself back through Arabic and Italian, and the eighteenth-century building boom that put a face over nearly every door, naming the rare known sculptor, Jacques Verberckt, alongside the anonymous stonecutters paid by the metre. Next time you pass a doorway here, it's worth tilting your head back.