National Railway Museum of Pietrarsa

This guide to the National Railway Museum of Pietrarsa in Naples opens with a wreath still laid every first of May before a plaque naming four workers, and traces back to 1840, when King Ferdinand the Second built this ironworks beside Italy's first rail line, forging locomotives inside the soaring iron-arched hall known as the Cathedral. You'll hear how unification left the plant in new hands that halved wages, and how on the sixth of August 1863 the workers struck again over pay still owed, as City Guards and armed Bersaglieri under an officer named Nicola Amore were called to the gates. Stand inside the brick hall to picture the ironworks as it was before that afternoon changed it.