How is a Moroccan lantern or lamp made?

There is a street in the Marrakech medina I always take visitors down at dusk, because that is when the metalworkers' lanterns come alive — hundreds of them hanging in clusters, throwing pierced patterns of light across the walls and the faces of everyone passing. By day you can watch them being born in the workshops behind, where the sound is a constant bright tapping of small hammers on metal.

A lantern starts as flat sheets of brass, copper or humble tin. The craftsman scores the panels, cuts them with shears, and hammers them over wooden or iron forms to curve them into the body, the dome, the little finial on top. The panels are then soldered together over a flame. Everything is shaped by eye and hand — you can feel the faint unevenness of the hammer-work on a real one, which is exactly how you tell it from a machine-stamped import.

The decoration is the soul of the piece. Holding a nail-like punch or a fine chisel, the artisan strikes pattern after pattern through the metal — tiny stars, teardrops, lacework arabesques — so that a lit candle or bulb inside projects those shapes onto the room. On finer lamps he sets pieces of jewel-coloured glass behind the openings, so the light glows ruby, amber and blue. I have sat in a workshop while a man pierced a dome freehand, dozens of holes a minute, the pattern emerging with no template at all but the one in his head.

You can watch this in the metalworkers' souk (the Souk Haddadine) in Marrakech and in the Seffarine square in Fes, where coppersmiths have hammered for centuries. Our guides can take you into a workshop rather than just a shop, so you see the cutting and piercing first-hand. Buy one and ship it home, or simply stand in the lane at nightfall and watch a hundred hand-pierced lamps turn an ordinary alley into something out of a dream.