Piazza dei Miracoli at dawn

The Campo dei Miracoli is a walled green rectangle with four white marble buildings standing on it and nothing else — no cafes, no parked cars, no clutter. That emptiness is the whole point photographically: the background is a lawn and a sky, and the subjects have room to move.

The lawn is open and free from early morning, long before the monuments themselves sell tickets, and that is the window. Between first light and about half past eight you can work the length of the piazza — the tower from the north-east corner with the cathedral apse beside it, the baptistery framed down the central axis, the arcaded flank of the Duomo as a repeating pattern. The marble is a cool white that goes warm and pink for the first half hour of sun.

Two practicalities. Walking on the grass is not allowed in the roped sections, so plan poses for the paths and the low marble kerbs. And the famous propping-up-the-tower pose is done by everyone in the middle of the day: at dawn there is nobody to include, which is exactly why the same shot suddenly looks good.