Giocondo Fino - Public domain portrait photograph

Nunes Vais was a cultured and refined man of fin de siècle Florence, belonging to a Jewish family from Livorno that had recently transplanted to Florence. He never traded in his business, which he regarded as an enjoyable hobby, and over the course of some forty years he took more than sixty thousand photographs. Attentive and curious about the world around him he managed, through his photographs, to capture the society of his time, without limitations and always driven by a strong artistic sense.