The peculiar decision of the Berlin city authorities to pull down the former parliament building of the German Democratic Republic and replace it with a replica of the Hohenzollern’s former city centre palace is a fine example of a Potemkin village: the facade may be baroque, oozing centuries of German history, but the interior will be an all mod con affair. More widely across Europe, a new wave of imaginative frescography has brought fake beaches into city streets far from any sea. Disneyesque castles and mock mediaeval scenes can be superimposed on the walls of tired townscapes.

Governments and civic authorities of all political persuasions have relied on cunning trompe l'oeil to fool the unwitting outsider.