Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, Luigi Ghirri photographed Italy without leaving a theme park. Italia in Miniatura, near Rimini, gathers scale models of the country’s monuments and landscapes into improbable proximity, and it is this fabricated terrain — not the peninsula itself — that held his attention for the better part of a decade.

Ghirri worked there with his characteristic alertness to coincidence and irony, noting where one reconstructed landmark ended and another began, where a model’s persuasive surface gave way to the fact of its making. The pictures ask what shrinking a country does to the idea of a country, and what that says about a medium that also reduces the world to fit a frame. They belong to his In Scala series, among his most playful and conceptually exacting bodies of work.

This book gathers that series in full, adding a substantial group of previously unseen images, and sets it beside material by Ivo Rambaldi, the park’s founder and designer: maps, sketches, collages and reference pictures assembled on research trips across Italy. Rambaldi’s frankly functional documents share with Ghirri’s photographs a willingness to work with an amateur’s perspective and tools. What results is less illustration than a meeting of two kinds of fabrication.

Ilaria Campioli, Joan Fontcuberta and Matteo Guidi brought the volume together, writing essays alongside one by Simon Garfield; Fontcuberta also contributes a photographic series made in response to the park. Ghirri’s own suggestion — that truth might conceal itself precisely in a space of total fiction — sits usefully over the whole.

For a collector, the argument rests on completeness and context rather than scarcity: the series assembled whole, with unseen additions, and an archive that allows the photographs to be read as an exchange between a photographer and a designer’s miniature world.