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When Russell Bekins first came to work at Italia in Miniatura in 1997, he noticed that kids would go right up to the theme park’s 1:25 scale models of Italy’s architectural wonders and knock on the doors. “I thought, what if people actually came out the windows and they started talking?” says Bekins. That very notion inspired the UCLA-trained stage director and former Hollywood story analyst to create an interactive animatronics installation for the park’s town square.
Bekins is part of an emerging miniature-park industry in Europe. The parks are literally a fraction of the size of a real park, and guests walk around them as if they are giants intruding on tiny little lands. In the case of Italia in Miniatura, the park is a minature recreation of Italy, including major landmarks, authentic-looking architecture, and even a few characters. Other miniparks in Europe include Minimundus in Austria, Bekonscot Model Village in the United Kingdom, and Madurodam in The Hague.
The 1:40 scale “Piazza Italia” is one of the highlights of Italia in Miniatura, located in Rimini. Kids come back and ask, “Is the lady in today?” They’re talking about Signora Gina, a tiny animatronic woman who pokes her head out the window when kids ring her doorbell, squirting them with water and yelling “I’m going to call the carabinieri!”
“I still know of no other attraction like it anywhere,” says Bekins, who is a oneman multimedia department for the park. “We have an outstanding scenery shop called General Display, which produces some of the very best miniatures in the world. But these must also move, make noises, and tell stories if they are to be successful in the current market.”
How did Bekins, an American who grew up near
Disneyland in California, make the career movefrom the Hollywood movie industry to an Italian
theme park? His wife, Silvia, is a daughter of Ivo
Rambaldi, who founded and built Italia in
Miniatura in 1970. Her brother Paolo, the park’s
director, and sisters, Ivana and Lisa, convinced the
couple to return from California in 1997 and help
them run the family business, S.E.P.A.R. SpA. “We
never looked back,” Bekins, 49, says happily.
Cultural Tourism
“Miniature parks are especially popular in
Europe because many tourists move around
for cultural reasons,” says Paolo Rambaldi,
52, who was a teen when Italia in Miniatura
opened. He has also helped build some of
the models. Today, the park covers an area
that is four times larger than the original
Italian boot-shaped peninsula. It boasts
more than 270 models in varying scales from
1:25 to 1:50, including 119 Venetian palazzos
that took nine years to complete.
“Through a miniature park, you can visit
your country’s monuments and experience your heritage
in just a few hours,” Rambaldi says of the park,
which attracts more than 600,000 visitors a year.
Bekins has created sound tracks for almost
everything in Italia in Miniatura, from an 18th-century string orchestra sound track and ghosts that speak Veneto dialect for the Venice canal ride to Casanova himself. The animatronic figure sits on the Ponte de Academia—the Academy Bridge—playing the violin and talking to riders as they pass underneath.
Every few years, major attractions are added to stimulate repeat visitors. Recent successes include a “driving school” for kids with talking cars and GPS-inspired navigation system. There’s also a scale model of a local castle that kids besiege, firing water cannons at each other. Bekins developed the attraction concept, called “Cannonacqua,” five years ago, but it took a heat wave in 2004 to persuade Rambaldi that it would be an asset to the dry park. “Russell is extremely determined and creative,” he says. “He works day and night when he gets a good feel for an attraction, and he has come up with very good solutions.”
Another unique aspect of Italia in Miniatura is that almost every attraction has been engineered in-house, including Italy’s first monorail system, which goes up and down hills, and a flume ride. “Ivo, and then Paolo, started experimenting very early on with what the idea of a miniatures park was,” Bekins notes. “The park’s philosophy is ‘small parks can do big things.’”
The technical innovation extends to model making, which through the use of CAD (computerassisted design), has become as much of a science as an art. Most important, automation has cut the time that it takes to produce miniatures from three to four models per year to two per month, enabling the scenery shop, General Display Srl, which is run by cousin Maurizio Frisoni, to create models and micro-animations for parks around the world.
“In 1997-1998, we built Magic Park beside a major cathedral sanctuary in Aparecida, Brazil,” says Rambaldi. “About 12 million pilgrims go there every year, so it’s a mixture of a miniature park, a fun park, and a religious park. We also built what I think is the largest animated nativity scene in the world.”
Equal Parts Education and Fun
A new miniature park on Germany’s Lake Constance is a joint venture between Italia in Miniatura and Austria’s Minimundus. Opened last May, Minimundus Bodensee features 36 new models manufactured in Italy and 40 models moved from the Austrian park. Among the architectural and environmental themes are Niagara Falls, the Pyramid of Cheops, and Dubai’s Burj Al Arab, the sail-shaped seven-star hotel.
“We can’t change our product as often as an amusement park does,” says Diethard Humer, manager of Minimundus in Klagenfurt, Austria. “So our idea was to work with our brand at two, three, or four parks.” Having attracted 16 million visitors since 1958, Minimundus is known by 90 percent of Austrians as well as by residents of neighboring countries.
“If you do it right, a miniature park is an attraction for people of every age, so it needs to be a little bit cultural, a little bit educational, let’s say, maybe like The History Channel,” says Humer, 47, who came to Minimundus after developing recreational facilities on lands reclaimed from mining operations. “On the other hand, and Paolo does it very well in Italy, you have to provide some attractions, too. Twenty or 30 years ago, it was enough to have an openair museum in a scale of 1:25, but now I think it’s more and more necessary to strike the right proportion between the fun world and the educational world. Then it’s going to be a success.”
Around the World in Miniature: The IAMP “There are quite a few
miniature parks in the
world. We counted about
54 of them,” says Paolo
Rambaldi, noting that 18 The organization was founded in 2001 by Rambaldi; Eiran Gazit, the founder and former CEO of Mini Israel; and Giedie Bierens, then-managing director of the Netherlands’ Madurodam, Europe’s oldest and most influential miniature park. Gazit recalls a gathering in 2000 at an exhibition of
some of the preliminary models for Mini Israel. Conversations The administrative and financial management of
the organization is divided between Madurodam in
The Hague and Mini-Europe in Brussels. Every year,
the group chooses a different member park to
host the annual two-and-a-half-day conference,
according to Peter Verdaasdonk, IAMP president,
managing director of Madurodam, and a former manager Though IAMP was inspired by IAAPA, Verdaasdonk
says, it is not a miniature version of a large trade
organization. “It’s more like a semi-informal club of
friends and colleagues,” he says. “We are trying to
exchange best practices and common experiences
among each other. We are also trying to help new
miniature parks to come into existence with highquality Today, IAMP members keep each other informed
about new park development and then make contact
to offer their support. “We help to review business
objectives, drawings, and concepts,” says Verdaasdonk.
He points to Istanbul’s Miniaturk, which commissioned
models from Mini Israel, and the Canary
Islands’ Pueblochico, whose owners sought advice Cooperative efforts among IAMP parks include a flourishing model exchange program. Two years ago, Madurodam had a special exhibition called “Sacred Buildings, Holy Houses,” which showcased models from many different miniature parks. “We borrowed Hagia Sophia from Miniaturk and churches from all over Europe,” says Verdaasdonk. Diethard Humer, manager of Minimundus in Klagenfurt,
Austria, has organized a traveling show of a
dozen scale models of Chinese buildings that will be
on view at Madurodam in the future. “They’re traveling
all over Europe at the moment. Shopping centers
are paying $20,000 for a two week’s rental,” says
Humer, whose strategy is to earn income in the winter |
Miniature America? Bekins theorizes that America is not yet metropolitan in the way Europe is. “Europe looks to its great cities and their architecture as the maximum expression of their culture. The United States still looks to its wide open spaces,” he says. “Perhaps a miniature park of our national parks would fly.” “We sometimes make a joke—the concept of the United States is not something that you can link with a concept of miniatures because everything is so big,” Verdaasdonk says wryly. “But that’s a joke. I still have the idea in my gut it should be possible to have the history of the U.S in miniature.” In fact, America in Miniature, an indoor theme park envisioned for Las Vegas, has been in the planning stages for three years. Eiran Gazit, the founder and former CEO of Mini Israel as well as a founder of the International Association of Miniature Parks, has signed on as senior vice president. Paolo Rambaldi stands ready to manufacture the 200-plus models. “We completed all our studies. We’re now at the funding stage,” says project founder Edward van der Meer, a Dutch real estate investor living in the United States who was entranced by Madurodam as a child. |
