To do this they’ve prioritised logic over territory, of which Italy has lost a very small amount. The logic is that the border should be the watershed, and the watershed has moved south slightly, into Italy, as a result of melting ice below the southwestern Leone ridge, and beneath the Plateau Rosa to the southeast.

The amicable agreement is a bright note in an otherwise bleak tale of ice loss. The EU’s Copernicus weather service says the glaciers of the Alps will have lost half their remaining volume by 2050.

In the increasingly unlikely event of rapid worldwide emissions cuts, it’s just possible, though, that Europe’s glaciers could be growing again by the end of the century.