One morning in August 1951, at a $1-a-night hotel in Florence, Italy, two American women came face to face in the hallway. One was Ruth Orkin, a promising 29-year-old photojournalist who was seeking a subject for a magazine photo spread about the experiences of women traveling abroad alone — a rare thing to do at the time.

The other was Ninalee Allen, a 23-year-old adventure-seeking graduate of Sarah Lawrence College who had been traveling solo for months through France, Spain and Italy. She went by "Jinx" because she thought it sounded exciting. "She was beautiful, luminescent and, unlike me, very tall," Orkin later told the New York Times. Allen agreed to the photo shoot as a lark, and off they went through the streets of Florence.