Doll Hospital
Family-run toy and doll restoration atelier organised like a hospital, with wards for eyes, limbs and fabric skin.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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