Originally posted by MarinatedHerring I made that comment because I am an American who visited Venice many times. I have made mistakes. This is one of them. The church and curators prohibit photography for a multitude of reasons. A guard or worker that gave permission was likely not in the position to authorize photography. Typical museum worker in Italy though. Very friendly and willing to bend the rules a bit. Works in favor of the tourist for sure. Still, I never took photos in this place and other cathedrals out of respect. Please follow the rules put in place on pamphlets or other official documents in order to respect such places and other visitors.
Beautiful photos but honestly these photos evoke memories of the hundreds of tourists I've seen in Italy clicking away with their cameras in places where photography was prohibited. Cringe!
The reasons for prohibiting photography are varied, but are mostly either financial reasons (they want you to buy their souvenir guidebooks, which often contain much better photos than a casual visitor can take) or they want to avoid colour deterioration brought about by people using conventional flashguns, or they want to limit the congestion that occurs around some exhibits. In some places, you can buy a permit to photograph the exhibits. Some exhibitions are on loan to museums, and the terms of the loan prohibit photography, even though the rest of their exhibits are free to be photographed.
The worst example of blatant disregard for these rules that I've seen was in Cappadocia, Turkey where fragile ancient wall paintings were allowed to be photographed without flash, but tourists still blazed away with everything from point-and-shoot cameras to large DSLRs, in spite of the request being spelled out in many different languages.
The development of non-UV light sources in flashguns (ie LEDs, as most phone cameras now have) will remove the prohibition on the use of flash, eventually.