One way to get better photos is to go to more interesting places is advise I heard on a You Tube video featuring Scott Kelby. Today’s photos come from Florence, Italy, one of the most interesting places I have traveled.

Florence is interesting for a variety of reasons including the art and artists who lived and worked in the Remanence period. The centerpiece of old Florence is the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and its magnificent dome. The dome and its surroundings are highlighted by the automobile restrictions put in place to keep the old city a walking only zone.

Not only is walking true to the era of the art and buildings in the old city, but walking also forced us to see things that would otherwise be a blur. All that walking demands little rewards along the way. So, we, my wife and I, decided our reward would be gelato.

It wasn’t warm on the March Day we circumnavigated il Duomo and the piazza it occupies. In fact, with temperatures in the high 40’s (Fahrenheit), we could easily have moved on to something hot. Since there is no bad time for ice cream we headed to a store where we could sit down for a while and enjoy the creamy concoction that seems to be ubiquitous in every Italian city, gelato. Approaching the outdoor window, we saw one of the clerks dipping a wafer into chocolate before she placed it on top of the double scooped cone that was headed to a customer.

She broke it into two pieces.

Her colleague, seeing the difficulty she was having with the delicate nature of her task, began spreading chocolate on another wafer to replace the one he knew she would break. “I’m gonna laugh if you break that,” I said in English.

” I’m not the expert, she is,” he replied. She glared at him. In less time than it takes Clark Kent to change into Superman in the phone booth, he broke his wafer.

We laughed.

We, the two clerks, my wife and I, laughed together (it works well in both English and Italian) and then got down to the business of ordering our gelato. Having ordered, I pulled out my camera to take a few photos of the quaint little shop these two were spending their days in, amusing themselves while attracting tourist dollars for their shop. Competition was fierce as they weren’t the only gelato place on the piazza.

Seeing they were a little camera shy we moved to the back of the store, and I pulled out a long lens to capture some candid shots.

They were watching me watching and photographing them. So together they decided to reward my curiosity and presented themselves at our table with perfectly assembled gelato orders for another customer. Without a word, their actions shouted, “take my picture.” So, I did.