Massimo Vitali is most well known for his series of beach scene photographs in Italy begun in the early 1990s. Vitali has been doing this for a few years now, and has perfected his technique. He sets up his custom-made perch 20 to 30 feet in the air, frames the landscape background he plans to capture with his large format camera, and then waits for the scene to fill up with people and their individual dramas. The images are crowded and dense and rich with banal detail. Groups of people congregate closely together in resort or tourist settings — trying to relax or play — while wedged between land and sea on a bleached strip of sand at seaside resorts or on the snow covered slopes of alpine ski resorts, or, as here, on the piazza between the main portal of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and Ghiberti's 'Gates of Paradise' of the Baptistry in Florence