Between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992), a landscape artist and photographer who explored the relationship between fiction and reality, roamed the slightly melancholic paths of the Italia in Miniatura theme park in Rimini.

Emblematic of the boom in mass tourism in post-war Italy, Rimini is a seaside resort where Ivo Rambaldi, another dreamer, constructed his miniature reproductions of Italy's most famous landmarks and monuments, which gave substance to the concept of country. It is unknown whether the photographer ever met the park's creator, but during his wanderings, he immortalized these three-dimensional postcards.

Through Ghirri's lens, the miniature landscapes seem imposing. And in a disturbingly temporal short-circuit, the eerily deserted esplanade of Florence's Piazza della Signoria, with Michelangelo's David, evokes images of the deserted major tourist sites during the Covid-19 pandemic.

A plunging gaze

The photos, from one of the photographer's best-known series that were collected into a book and published in January by MACK, show a handful of visitors viewing the Tower of Pisa from above, or casting an eye over a pocket-sized St. Peter's Basilica.

In the book's introduction, the Italian curator and photographer Ilaria Campioli compares the bird's-eye view of the park to the one we now have of the planet through Google Earth. In Rambaldi's park, stairs enable visitors to climb the Italian mountains with their crests, peaks and foothills delicately outlined against the soft skies of the Adriatic coast.

The play of light on the asymmetrical mountain faces is truer than nature, but sometimes the photographer goes behind the scenes and shows mountains with flat backs. Tiny blue panels transform pebble-edged rivulets into national rivers.

Small freeways for toy cars and railway tracks for model trains mark out the territory. The seas that wash the shores of the Italian peninsula are represented by small freshwater lakes. Visitors can view the park, which has been formed into Italy's boot-like shape, from an electric monorail train constructed six meters above the ground.

Ghirri's photographs tell the story of a quest to bring together, through faithful reproductions, the diverse realities of a country imperfectly and belatedly united that is still marked by internal borders – a land of contradictions and contrasts.

A model of a hut in Ravenna, where Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882), one of the great architects of Italy's reunification, once stayed, is also featured in the park. Rambaldi traveled his country from north to south to prepare for the construction of his work, which would immortalize the sites, whose replicas Ghirri would in turn photograph. The curator Campioli wrote in the book Italia in Miniatura: "The amusement park becomes a great metaphor for the way photography works."

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