The windows in the Old Town tell the same story as everything else, Tosca surrounds, iron bars, wooden shutters, repeated across buildings of different ages with enough variation to tell you something about who lived there and when.
The deep-set window is the standard form. Walls this thick push the window back from the street, which does several things at once, it keeps the interior cooler, it creates a natural display ledge, and it makes the ironwork grille a structural as much as a decorative element. The bars are not decorative. They were necessary and they stayed because they still work.
The ironwork varies considerably. The simplest grilles are plain verticals with a horizontal or two, functional, unadorned, probably original. The more elaborate ones, foliate, decorative, occasionally extraordinary appear on buildings that could afford to commission them. Both have been there long enough that the iron has stained the stone around the fixings.
The triple arched window on the market exterior is the most formally composed example in the Old Town. Three arches in Tosca with a consistent rhythm that reads as architectural intention rather than utility. Most windows here are utility. That one is a statement and probably had a use long forgotten.
At the other end of the range, a modern glazed facade has appeared in the upper part of the Old Town. It is mentioned here for completeness.
The last photograph shows a window in a wall that is actively falling apart. The shutter is still there. The render has gone. The Tosca beneath it will outlast everything around it.
The ironwork on these windows follows the same tradition as the door knockers in Door Knockers. The Tosca surrounds that frame them are in Stone.
