[stoppingdown]

The personal use/profit use thing is a different point - I mean, in Italy the Ministry of Cultural Heritage theoretically requires a permit if you take a photo for professional purposes in an a valuable context (which in Italy includes most town/village centers, as it would be in France, Spain and other countries). While I disagree with this law, it's rarely enforced. The paradoxical point of the article is when they guess that a photographer using a professional equipment is surely doing a professional job. Nonsense: if I have the money I can buy a race car and have also all the tuning stuff, this doesn't mean that when I drive it I'm a professional race driver. If I drive faster than the speed limit, it's another matter.

Sometimes I hear of problems - this rarely occurs anyway - if you use a tripod: sometimes the authorities are just worried about over-crowding public places; imagine e.g. the center place of Florence (which is not so large) packed with people wanting to use a tripod at the same moment.