Selecting parent and child data

I have an application front end which speaks to a PostgreSQL database. I’m trying to find the most efficient way to extract a structure similar to the below.

CREATE TABLE people (
  person_id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  fname     VARCHAR
);

CREATE TABLE items (
  person_id INTEGER REFERENCES people (person_id),
  item_id   SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  title     VARCHAR
);

INSERT INTO people (fname) VALUES
  ('Bob'),
  ('Jim'),
  ('Geoff');

INSERT INTO items (person_id, title) VALUES
  (1, 'Cat'),
  (1, 'Dog'),
  (1, 'Monkey'),
  (2, 'Elephant');

My current approach would be to list all of the items, then (within the application) iterate over each and run a SELECT. Something similar to this Pseudo code:

items = db.Query(SELECT * FROM people);
for item in items
   itemsub = db.Query(SELECT * FROM items WHERE id = item.person_id)

There are a number of reasons why I don’t like this.

• It requires a minimum of 1 + N(People) queries to extract a simple data structure. For a page containing 1000 items, this would produce a ton of network traffic.

• The application has to manually iterate over the list atleast twice more after the database, one to build the better structure and a second to render it.

• It seems like something a database should be able to do

One other alternative would be to perform a JOIN, but this would result in extra processing to remove duplicates in the application

The resulting structure should be relatively simple:

peopleItems{ 
   array people{ 
             array items{}
         }
}

However, I can’t for the life of me work out the best approach.