Christmas in small-town Italy is quiet. These are grey, sometimes foggy Sundays, where human presence is rare or completely invisible. Where has everyone gone? People are eating in restaurants or in their homes, rushing to the city center to buy gifts or discussing how much the illuminations along the shopping streets will cost this year. Meanwhile, flesh-and-blood people have been replaced by alter egos made of plastic and wire, such as the ubiquitous inflatable polyester Santas, the rakish snowmen on the now-rare snow days, and the scattered anthropomorphic luminaries decorating crooked trees, crumbling abandoned houses, and busy country roads. While the narrow streets of the city center are crowded with people elbowing each other over mulled wine and overpriced junk, elsewhere in the outskirts or in the quiet villages of the lowlands, parking lots, industrial warehouses, melancholy farmhouses and bleak 1960s apartment buildings are being invaded by an army of Christmassy “urban accessories” Much as Filippo Minelli documented the whacky landscape monstrosities of the Po Valley in his “Atlante dei Classici Padani”, December in this flat agro-industrial land is made up of artefacts whose iconic presence, garish colours, and questionable aesthetics contrasts with the simple and practical architecture of nowheresville. The result is an ephemeral augmented reality, a series of surreal scenes that, for as quick as single month, transform the monotonous landscape of the sticks into an ironic visual puzzle. In just a short time the Po Valley reveals one of its most bizarre and intriguing sides. It is as if, for a fleeting moment, the monotonous fabric of the everyday world is torn open to reveal an extravagant parallel universe populated by wired dummy creatures, ephemeral lights and lucent trees. Celebrating Christmas away from the big city is therefore an adventure, a disorienting journey into the dimension of the absurd, a place where the mundane meets the extraordinary. It is a chance to look at the everyday differently, an opportunity to rediscover the humor and lightness that we often lose in the midst of our routines.