Three flags and not one person. Squares like this have two states and I happened to catch the rarer of them, at an hour when the town had not yet decided to come outside.
By noon there would have been chairs and tables across the whole of this foreground, a market at the far end, and no chance whatsoever of seeing the building. That version is livelier and considerably worse as a record of the architecture.
Empty is a time of day
If you want a public space to yourself, the window is narrower than you think and it is almost always early. Not dawn — dawn is for landscapes. For towns it is the hour after the street cleaners and before the first cafe puts its boards out.
A square with nobody in it is not a photograph of a square. It is a photograph of an hour.
Something I have started saying and cannot stop
The flags gave me trouble. Flags either hang limp, which looks like a mistake, or blow out fully, which reads as a postcard. These were somewhere in between for about a second at a time, and I took a lot of frames to get three of them behaving at once.
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