Luigi Ghirri & Ivo Rambaldi, Italia in Miniatura, 2024

Between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, Luigi Ghirri made a series of photographs meditating on the landscape of his homeland, all within a theme park in Rimini.
The popular tourist destination Italia in Miniatura featured scale models of Italy’s major natural and architectural monuments, juxtaposed in surreal ways. Ghirri photographed this fictional world with irony and a keen sensitivity to visual coincidences, the relationship between illusion and reality, ambiguity and artifice. Reflecting on photography’s own processes of shrinking and representation, these images are among Ghirri’s most distinctive and conceptually compelling.

This new book presents Ghirri’s entire In Scala series, expanded with numerous previously unpublished images, and places it in dialogue with the work of the park’s founder and designer, Ivo Rambaldi. Rambaldi’s maps, sketches, collages and reference images, made during exhaustive research trips throughout Italy, offer a similar exploration of the possibilities and paradoxes of miniaturization.
From the dialogue between these meticulous works of representation and fabrication we discover the possibility that, in Ghirri’s words, “perhaps it is precisely in this space, of total fiction, that truth is hidden.”

The publication, edited by Ilaria Campioli, Joan Fontcuberta and Matteo Guidi, includes essays by the curators and Simon Garfield. Completing the volume is a series of images created by visual artist and theorist Joan Fontcuberta in response to Ghirri and Rambaldi’s encounters with the park.