"I reconstructed images that followed me since I was a child," says Ventura. "Of an Italy that I would have liked to have seen, but that no longer exists and perhaps never existed except in my own fantasy." —Paolo Ventura Village Fair (Festa di paese), 2005, is from Paolo Ventura's War Souvenirs, his series of fictional World War II tableaux. Each image in the series features a detailed construction, meticulously designed and built by the artist. Some of the characters that inhabit the stage-like settings are toy action figures, others are made from fired clay; all are roughly the same size as Barbie dolls. Each setting takes about a week or longer to build, and is destroyed after Ventura photographs it. When Ventura was a boy in Italy, he spent time with his grandmother listening to stories and looking at family photographs from both World Wars. According to Ventura, 90% of the photographs sent home by European soldiers during WWII were taken in photographic studios, as most of the soldiers were too poor to own their own cameras. Ventura expressed the desire to enter these studio photographs and then exit out into the real context of the soldiers' lives. And so he places these wartime figures into his constructed streets and alleys; into death, loneliness, amusement, war, and desperate love-all in reduced, but realistic scale. Ventura seeks to deceive and create confusion between what we see and what we think we see. As Francine Prose notes, the end result is "an evocative mix of vagueness and precision that constitutes the simultaneously skewed and accurate truth of a child's understanding of war and loss and death, an imagined vision (assembled from relics and fragments of family narrative) of a distant and vanished past."