Doll Hospital

The Doll Hospital on Via San Biagio dei Librai in Naples' old quarter opens with a puzzle: how a workshop that once fit into eighteen square metres now repairs about four hundred toys a year, when its founder needed seven or eight years to reach that same total. The guide traces back to 1895, when the puppet-prop maker Luigi Grassi first fixed a neighbourhood mother's broken doll and word spread in Neapolitan dialect that this was the dolls' hospital. It follows four generations of the Grassi family, down to the great-granddaughter who eventually moved the business into a larger space. Listen for how the tiny original workshop still shapes the way repairs are done today.